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WAR AND INSURANCE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



WAR AND INSURANCE 



AN ADDRESS 

DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHILOSOPHICAL UNION 

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT ITS 

TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY AT BERKELEY 

CALIFORNIA, AUGUST 27, 1914 



BY 



JOSIAH ROYCE 

ALFOBD PROFESSOR OF NATURAL RELIGION, MORAL 

PHILOSOPHY AND CIVIL POLITY AT 

HARVARD UNIVERSITY 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION 
AND NOTES 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1914 

All rights reserved 



U<3 S055" 
.Rfe 



COPYRIGHT, 1914, 

By THE MAOMILLAN COMPANT. 
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914. 



Norfoooti i|«88 

J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 

OCT 15 1914 

©CU387031 



±' 






PREFACE 

As a preparation for an address which I 
had been invited to deliver on the occasion 
of the twenty -fifth anniversary of the Philo- 
sophical Union of the University of Cali- 
fornia, I read to a general audience, at the 
summer session of that University at Berke- 
ley (during the last fortnight of July, in the 
present year) a series of six philosophical 
lectures. These six preparatory lectures 
contained a restatement of the theory of 
what I had called, in a recent book of mine, 
the " Process of Interpretation," and, in par- 
ticular, discussed the nature and functions 
of " Communities of Interpretation." What 
this last term means the reader of this present 
book may learn, if he pleases, on pages 47-64. 

I had intended to continue and to sum- 
marize the main theses of these six lectures 
in my anniversary address before the Union. 

iii 



PREFACE 

The summer session ended. The war began. 

My address, in the form in which I had 
intended to read it, was thus rendered use- 
less, and was thrown aside. But the theory 
both of the "process of interpretation" and 
of "the communities of interpretation" had, 
during the last two years, seemed to me ca- 
pable of a wide range of practical applica- 
tions ; and some of these, including a sketch 
of certain very general philosophical aspects 
of banking and of insurance, had been already 
presented to my audience at Berkeley during 
the July lectures just mentioned. 

Abandoning, then, my previous plans for 
the address before the Union, I wrote this 
present address, — partly in the neighborhood 
of Los Gatos, in the Santa Cruz mountains 
of the California Coast Range, and partly 
at Berkeley. This writing took place be- 
tween August 2 and August 27, under the 
immediate influence of impressions due to the 
events which each day's news then brought 
to the notice of us all ; and yet with a 
longing to see how the theory of "interpre- 

iv 



PREFACE 

tation" which I owe to the logical studies of 
the late Mr. Charles Peirce, would bear the 
test of an application to the new problems 
which the war brings to our minds. 

I have to thank my friend, Mr. John Gra- 
ham Brooks, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
as well as my colleague, Mr. H. B. Dow (lec- 
turer on Insurance at Harvard University) ; 
and, above all, my philosophical colleague 
at the University of California, Professor 
Charles H. Rieber (who was my host while 
I was at Berkeley, and who is also the presi- 
dent of the Philosophical Union), for some 
careful criticisms of this address; and for 
their aid in preparing it for publication. 

JOSIAH ROYCE. 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
September 15, 1914. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTION 



ADDRESS ON WAR AND INSURANCE 



SECTION PAGE 

I. The Utopia of Universal Peace . . 4 

II. The Neighbor : Love and Hate . . 12 

III. The Dangerous Social Relations and 

Communities 28 

IV. The Community of Interpretation . 42 
V. Special Communities of Interpretation 55 

VI. Mutual International Insurance . 65 

NOTES 

I. Steinmetz's " Philosophy of War " . 83 
II. Kant's Doctrine concerning "Antag- 
onism "as a Source of Social De- 
velopment 83 

III. Love for Communities .... 85 

IV. Efforts already made to use the Four 

Communities of Interpretation in 

International Affairs ... 86 
V. " The First Act of War " , , .93 



VII 



INTRODUCTION 

TT7"HEN a number of persons are subject 
to risks, they may contribute to a 
common fund, and then use this fund as a 
means of making good certain of the losses 
which, in consequence of these risks, fall upon 
one or another member of the company of 
adventurers who thus contribute. The con- 
tributions themselves form an insurance fund. 
The method of business in question con- 
stitutes the basis of the modern institution 
called insurance. The special ways in which 
the adventurers are brought into association, 
and the sorts of risk against which the indi- 
vidual members of a group of insurers are 
protected, vary widely. But at the basis of 
any systematic modern method of insurance 
lie considerations which belong to the general 
theory of probability, and which are every- 
where in question in the statistical sciences. 
Since risks, and the adventures of individual 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 

men, are amongst the most practical matters 
with which we are acquainted, while the 
theory of probability and the principles of 
statistical science involve some of the most 
abstruse problems of logic and mathematics, 
insurance, viewed either as a mode of business 
or as a social institution, is one of the most 
momentous instances of the union of very 
highly theoretical enterprises with very con- 
crete social applications. 

Furthermore, as experience shows, the 
insurance principle comes to be more and more 
used and useful in modern affairs. Not only 
does it serve the ends of individuals, or of 
special groups of individuals. It tends more 
and more both to pervade and to transform 
our modern social order. It brings into new 
syntheses not merely pure and applied science, 
but private and public interests, individual 
prudence, and a large regard for the general 
welfare, thrift, and charity. It discourages 
recklessness and gambling. It contributes 
to the sense of stability. It quiets fears and 
encourages faithfulness. 

x 



INTRODUCTION 

But this principle of insurance has not yet 
been applied to international affairs, and, in 
so far as the present writer is aware, no one 
has heretofore proposed that a group of nations 
should form an organization for the mutual 
insurance of its members against any kind of 
risks. 

The present essay offers reasons why such 
a proposal is both timely and feasible. Since 
the whole subject is new, what is attempted 
in this brief discussion cannot be a mature 
plan. This paper is preliminary, is tentative, 
and intends to be subject to a thoroughgoing 
revision. Its whole present purpose is gained, 
in fact, if it leads to a serious revision of its 
own imperfections. It wishes to attract the 
attention of some wiser minds than that of 
its author to the fact that, at the moment of 
an unprecedented crisis in the world's history, 
the possibility of precisely this new mode of 
international cooperation which is here out- 
lined is worthy of a somewhat careful study. 

Nations, viewed as corporate entities, are 
as subject to risks as are individual human 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

beings. Some of these risks are principally 
moral in their nature ; but many of them can 
be more or less exactly estimated in economic 
terms. Thus, floods, famines, pestilences, 
earthquakes, and volcanoes may interfere, in 
various fashions, with the economic as well 
as with the rest of the social life of the peoples 
thus afflicted. Apart from actual famines, 
the considerable failure of their crops may 
impair, for a season, the normal supplies of 
individual nations. Internal crises, social and 
political, may interrupt their healthy develop- 
ment in ways involving not only moral 
disasters, but heavy expenses. Such evils 
come upon various nations with irregularly 
recurrent, but also with widely different, 
weight and seriousness. Only a vast and 
long-continued collection and an exceedingly 
difficult statistical analysis of the facts regard- 
ing such calamities could determine the regu- 
larities which a sufficiently large number of 
instances of national disaster would be, if 
properly studied, certain to show. Such 
regularities, however, if once discovered, 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

would furnish an "actuarial basis" upon 
which an insurance of individual nations 
against such risks could conceivably be 
undertaken. 

But in order that an insurance could be 
actually undertaken, there would have to be 
in existence a vast and well-secured fund, 
contributed by a great number of individual 
nations, and held, under established rules, 
ready to supply the means of paying to an 
insured nation — perhaps the whole of its loss 
in case of any previously defined sort of dis- 
aster ; or perhaps such a portion of that loss 
as an equitably devised insurance contract, 
duly adjusted to the contribution previously 
made by the nation in question, declared to 
be payable from the common fund in case a 
certain definite disaster befell one of the 
nations which had subscribed to the insur- 
ance agreement. 

Since all irregularly distributed phenomena 
of a given type, if sufficiently numerous, — 
so long as they are indeed finite in number, 
— show some kind of statistical regularity, 

xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

this "actuarial basis" for various forms of 
international insurance could be furnished 
by the patient study of the economically de- 
finable risks and losses of a sufficiently large 
group of nations, followed through a long 
enough period of time. 

But an essay which, like the present one, 
proposes a new international enterprise, gains 
little from a mention of this purely the- 
oretical possibility. The fortunes of nations, 
— their risks and their calamities, in so far 
as such matters are estimable in economic 
terms at all, — might indeed be studied 
historically and statistically (as if by an 
observer from another planet), in case we 
had any hope that a group of nations could 
be induced to contribute to a common fund 
to be used for the insurance of individual 
nations against any special sorts of disaster. 
And a sufficient study of duly collected his- 
torical and statistical materials could indeed 
indicate to an expert actuary the way in 
which a group of nations could make pro- 
vision for compensating the individual mem- 

xiv 



INTRODUCTION 

bers of the group for certain disasters. But 
the main concern of this essay lies in propos- 
ing as a topic for further study and confer- 
ence the practical question whether any 
valid grounds can be given why various 
nations ought to be urged to contribute to 
such a common insurance fund. 

The proposal seems so far away from our 
present habits of international intercourse, 
and so unlikely to meet approval, that one 
who glances at the title of the present essay 
is likely to turn away from it without further 
reading. The only hope of the author lies 
in the fact that the topic of the essay may be 
approached from various sides, and may 
consequently arouse the interest of several 
sorts of people. Where one possible reader 
finds himself forthwith repelled, another may 
be induced to give to the topic a second 
thought even because of the very aspect of 
the matter which his neighbor has thought 
fantastic, or abstruse, or unpractical. The 
business of this word of introduction consists 
simply in indicating how many sided the 

xv 



INTRODUCTION 

topic is, and so how many and varied are the 
chances that the author's proposals are 
worthy of being submitted to scrutiny as 
much when they ought to be rejected as 
when, by chance, some of them are worthy 
of approval. For the principal value of 
these proposals lies in the fact that they have 
a certain novelty (although they are also 
the outcome of a lengthy process of previous 
reflection) ; that they set forth a method of 
practical action suited to the present crisis 
(although they are also founded on the theses 
of a student of philosophy) ; that they refer 
to matters which the experience of the busi- 
ness world has long since tested (although 
they also speak of issues which the tragedies 
of the present moment show to be infinitely 
ideal and pathetic) ; and finally that, while 
they are written down in the midst of a world 
war, they expressly analyze and attempt to 
use that motive which, in the history of 
humanity, has thus far most made for peace. 



xvi 



INTRODUCTION 

I 

Now the body of this essay approaches 
our main thesis from the side of "War." It 
discusses in a way which I believe to be 
somewhat novel some of the deepest motives 
which render war at present so fatally recur- 
rent and dangerous. Hereupon it draws a 
contrast between these essentially war-pro- 
ducing motives of human life and those 
motives which are exemplified in certain 
of the well-known and important social 
and commercial institutions of the world. 
Amongst those motives it dwells in particular 
upon the ones which are represented by the 
modern institution of insurance. Hereupon 
it outlines, with necessary brevity and incom- 
pleteness, a plan whereby a possible future 
organization for mutual insurance amongst 
the nations may be devised and may tend 
towards the gradual establishment of more 
pacific relations among the nations than 
they now possess. 

To the plan thus submitted certain obvious 
objections arise. While leaving to the essay 

xvii 



INTRODUCTION 

itself its own part in the exposition and 
defense of the plan for international insur- 
ance which is set forth, this Introduction 
will best serve its purpose if it briefly empha- 
sizes certain of these most obvious objections 
to the plan proposed, and then points out 
why they are not final, and how they may 
be in a measure obviated. 

The first of these objections will occur to 
every reader. If one supposes that for any 
reason a group of nations were considering 
whether to contribute to a common fund for 
the insurance of the individual nations 
belonging to this group against any class of 
evils, it would be natural to say: "All inter- 
national peace, under existing conditions, is 
fragile. A fund contributed by individual 
nations for their insurance against disasters 
would constitute a possible object of preda- 
tory attacks. In other words, the safety of 
the insurance fund would have to be pro- 
vided for. This would be as difficult as to 
provide for the carrying out of any other 
international agreement in which large inter- 

xviii 



INTRODUCTION 

ests were involved. Concerning the admin- 
istration of the fund differences of opinion 
would arise. Since the fund would be inter- 
national, these differences would have to be 
submitted to arbitration or else to war. To 
the already existing obstacles which the Hague 
tribunal has to meet new obstacles would be 
added. Differences of opinion concerning the 
use of the insurance funds would frequently 
involve what is usually called national honor. 
They would, therefore, be hopeless differ- 
ences. And this initial defect would appear 
to belong to any international insurance 
scheme." 

It is worth while in this Introduction to 
call especial attention to the fact that the 
plan outlined in the main body of this essay 
undertakes to meet this very objection by a 
novel proposal. This proposal contemplates 
the founding of an entirely new but very 
easily comprehensible kind of international 
corporation, — a distinctively new entity 
which would be neither a nation, nor a 
court of arbitration, nor an international 

xix 



INTRODUCTION 

congress, nor a federation of states, nor 
any such body as at present exists. The 
new body would be a Board of Trustees, 
with powers and duties which would be 
in the main fiduciary and with no political 
powers or obligations whatever. 

The new proposal depends upon a con- 
sideration which I believe to be deeply 
founded in human nature, and which can be 
best understood only if the reader is kind 
enough first to become acquainted with what 
this essay sets forth concerning those human 
relations which I call "dangerous" and those 
which, as I believe, experience shows to be 
essentially peaceful in their tendencies. 
Common sense well recognizes, and all human 
history, so far as it is applicable to the prob- 
lem at all, exemplifies the fact, that it is dif- 
ficult to find, for purposes of dealing with 
delicate and controversial matters, a trust- 
worthy politician, or a trustworthy diplomat, 
or a trustworthy ruler, or (in case of matters 
that involve sufficiently pressing and passion- 
ate issues), an entirely trustworthy and 

xx 



INTRODUCTION 

unprejudiced arbitrator or judge. But it is 
much easier to find, under suitable social 
conditions, a faithful and enlightened and fair- 
minded trustee. This essay contains many 
illustrations of the reasons why this assertion 
is true. 

This essay proposes that a certain fund, 
contributed by various nations, should be 
put into the hands of a board of international 
trustees. The constitution and the mode 
of selection of the members of this board is 
briefly set forth in the text. The board, 
according to the scheme proposed, would 
have a minimum of judicial powers. These 
judicial powers would never refer to ques- 
tions which could be called questions of 
national honor. The judicial problems of 
the board would be limited to questions 
referring to the actual interpretation of cer- 
tain contracts. These contracts would be 
either of the nature of insurance policies, or 
else of other forms of trust agreements. 
When these contracts had put certain funds 
into the hands of the board, the funds being 

xxi 



INTRODUCTION 

held in trust for certain insured nations, or 
for other nations that intrusted funds to the 
board, the board would have the sole right, 
in controversial cases, simply to decide what 
the terms of the contract, or of certain con- 
nected duties of trust, established as the right 
of the nation or nations of whose funds the 
board was trustee. 

The tentative proposal of this essay is 
that the decision of the board regarding these 
matters — a decision which would always 
be made by a public procedure and in accord- 
ance with established rules — would be a 
final decision, so that no nation should have 
any authority, under its agreement, to appeal 
from the decision in question. Reasons 
appear in the essay why such confidence in 
trustees regarding the interpretation of their 
own fiduciary duties would be well founded, 
if once the international agreement under 
which the board was constituted had been 
reasonably well devised, and if once the 
board had been carefully selected by the 
insuring nations and if the board were suf- 

xxii 



INTRODUCTION 

ficiently large and varied, and if its proceed- 
ings were public. 

The board of international trustees in 
question would possess, or would gradually 
and naturally acquire, various fiduciary duties 
in addition to those determined at any stage 
by its relation to the business of international 
insurance. Insurance is in many cases 
naturally combined with various forms of 
investment, and with various devices for 
serving the common ends of the members of 
a mutual insurance company. Every such 
fiduciary duty of the board would be deter- 
mined by special agreements and would be 
administered according to the rules and 
decisions of the board. Inevitably the board 
ought to have a right to proceed^against its 
own members by whatever^judicial methods 
it chose, in case an individual act involving 
breach of trust was in question. But the 
board as a whole would not have to report to 
any nation. It would act deliberately and 
publicly, but in the light of its own conscience 
and discretion. This entire autonomy of the 

xxiii 



INTRODUCTION 

board with regard to its duties and acts as 
trustee would be correlated with an entire ab- 
sence of any political functions or powers. 

The international board of trustees which 
my plan contemplates would have no police 
to guard it, no international army or navy 
to protect it, no direct interest in interna- 
tional controversies, and no reason for diplo- 
matic relations with any existing powers. 
It would receive its funds in trust as volun- 
tary contributions of the nations. It would 
administer its trust in accordance with poli- 
cies of insurance and deeds of trust. It 
could neither declare war nor make peace. 
Nominally it might hold its sessions, after 
the manner of the Hague tribunal, in some 
neutral state, and be regarded as possessing 
a peculiarly close although essentially ideal 
and, so to speak, sentimental connection 
with that state. But its obligations would 
be to its own conscience, guided by the 
deeds of trust which it had undertaken to 
administer. 

Its members would be selected by inter- 
xxiv 



INTRODUCTION 

national agreement. Its rules would be sub- 
ject to change only in such fashion as did 
not abridge the rights already acquired by the 
nations who had entered into the agreement. 

Just as the individual holder of the pol- 
icy of an insurance company has, if he is dis- 
satisfied with the conduct of his company, 
the freedom to surrender his policy and to 
receive in turn the "surrender value" of 
that policy, so, subject to certain general 
and reasonable rules regarding due notice 
and a proper period of time allowed for with- 
drawal, any nation that found itself dissatis- 
fied with the procedure of the international 
board of trustees would be free to withdraw 
its interest in the entire enterprise and to 
receive the "surrender value" of its policy, 
and a return of its funds held in trust. 

I submit that an international board of 
this kind would be at present a novelty, and 
that, if some form of international insurance 
proves to be feasible, such a body might 
become, in the end, one of the most potent 
international enterprises on earth. 

xxv 



INTRODUCTION 

But all the foregoing is subject to the very 
obvious objection, that if the board had no 
army, no navy, and no political powers, it 
would be helpless to defend the funds com- 
mitted to its trust from the assaults of any 
power that desired to use these funds for its 
own purposes. In fact, the powers of the 
board of trustees in question would be indeed 
financial and fiduciary in case the nations 
respected these powers. But such powers, 
an objector might insist, would be wholly 
spiritual. Wherein would he their temporal 
safeguard ? 

To this perfectly obvious objection this 
essay proposes an equally obvious plan by 
which the funds committed to the trustees 
could be so invested that they were actually 
inaccessible to any power on earth which 
was not actually in a position to conquer 
all of the powers who had entered into the 
insurance agreement or who had deposited 
funds with the trustees. The funds could 
be invested as widely in the world as one 
pleases, and could be made subject to the 

xxvi 



INTRODUCTION 

order of the board of trustees and of that 
board only. If an individual capitalist, fear- 
ing that a war of the nations might endan- 
ger his private fortune, desired tp keep that 
fortune safe, he could, even in the present 
troubled world, guarantee that result with 
reasonable safety by investing his funds 
widely enough, in various countries, and 
securely enough in each of his selected deposi- 
tories. The new entity which this essay 
proposes to institute, the international board 
of trustees, would have far more varied 
opportunities to keep its funds in places 
where the armies and the navies of tjie 
various existing powers would threaten it 
in vain despite the publicity of all its official 
proceedings. 

The board would possess np territory which 
could be seized, it would lay claim to no 
neutrality which could be violated. Its 
absence of political power would secure it 
against direct armed assault. Its individual 
trustees might be made prisoners or executed ; 
but such efforts might well kill its body 

xxvii 



INTRODUCTION 

without touching its essentially intangible 
soul. 

Since its acts of investment would all be 
made according to established rules and 
under the public charge of the board, its 
individual trustees would have no power to 
surrender its funds, no matter how much 
they wished to do so. Only the board, 
acting in its corporate power as trustee, 
would have any power to dispose of the 
funds that were put into its trust. 

II 

The next objection which readily occurs to 
the mind, and which the reader of the plan 
for international insurance herein expounded 
is especially asked to notice, is founded upon 
the fact that if the nations, by large contribu- 
tions to the common fund, won for them- 
selves large and important rights through 
their insurance agreements, they would win 
hereby no safety against the dangers of war, 
and in particular of conquest. Yet amongst 
all the evils against which nations could 
xxviii 



INTRODUCTION 

insure, if a scheme for mutual insurance 
proved to be successful, some at least of the 
evils due to war would surely be the most 
important. The objector might well con- 
tinue that, if it were possible to give to the 
plan such a development as to enable the 
international board to insure an individual 
nation against any considerable portion of 
the losses and expenses which war might 
entail, the very success of the plan, up to 
that point, would tend to render individual 
nations careless, and so more disposed, if pos- 
sible, than they otherwise would be, to engage 
in war. For the man whose house is insured 
may thereby be rendered less rather than 
more careful with regard to the risk of fire. 
To both these objections the plan out- 
lined in this essay provides what may be 
regarded as at least a partial answer. This 
answer must be judged in the light of the 
few passages in the essay which directly 
deal with these aspects of the question. I 
call attention to these passages, and expressly 
point out that what I propose involves a 

xxix 



INTRODUCTION 

tentative suggestion, which is proposed for 
the sake of revision. 

What it is worth while to mention in this 
Introduction is that this essay suggests an 
extension to international insurance of devices 
which are already known in the insurance of 
individuals. In particular, a part of the 
plan here tentatively set forth would involve 
a way in which the life of every one of the 
insured nations was. so to speak, insured by 
the general insurance organization for the 
benefit of mankind. 

That is, the more rights an individual 
nation had acquired by virtue of previous 
insurance, the less motive a conqueror would 
have for finding this nation attractive prey. 
For the insurance board of trustees might 
undertake, by special agreements, functions 
which were not only those of insurance but 
also those of investment, so far as concerned 
an individual nation. That is. an individual 
nation might put a portion of its property in 
trust, and under the administration of the 
board. One could even now conceive that 



INTRODUCTION 

some South American republic might find 
such an investment of a portion of its wealth 
possible and useful. In the future still 
greater nations might be attracted into simi- 
lar undertakings. 

But if either insurance rights or trust 
funds thus belonged to a nation which hap- 
pened to suffer the accident of occupation 
or of conquest, the conqueror of such a nation 
would not, according to this plan, be able to find 
so much of the conquered nation's property, 
or to use it. For the plan defined in this 
essay includes the provision, that, if a nation 
loses its life, then its insurance rights, and 
of course its funds deposited in any form 
in trust with the international board, simply 
revert to the common fund of mankind, and are 
henceforth used and held in trust by the inter- 
national board for the benefit of all the insuring 
nations. 

Closely connected with this provision of 
the plan here outlined, is another, whereby 
whatever nation won in a war would be pre- 
vented from extorting from any vanquished 

xxxi 



INTRODUCTION 

nation, by means of any sort of treaty, either 
its insurance rights or any other funds which 
it had, before the war, put in trust with the 
board. This Introduction may well call 
attention to these aspects of the plan 
involved in this essay, since in case of the 
success of such a plan as the one here out- 
lined, these provisions might become valu- 
able allies to the cause of peace. 

Finally, so far as the present set of objec- 
tions is concerned, the important provision 
that any nation committing the "first act 
of war" with which a given contest began, 
would thereby vitiate so much of its policy 
as related to any possible insurance that it 
might possess against any of the costs or 
expenses of this particular war, — this im- 
portant provision would tend to introduce 
a restraining motive against war. And many 
other such restraining motives could be 
readily devised and added to this first motive 
by means of insurance agreements. How 
far-reaching such a provision would prove 
may be left for the further study of the 
xxxii 



INTRODUCTION 

reader of this essay and for such future 
discussions as this essay, by good fortune, 
may arouse amongst students of the ques- 
tions thus proposed. It is enough at this 
point simply to insist that there are here 
international questions which are worthy 
of careful consideration, and which do not 
involve any of tjie difficulties which have 
already played so large a part in the history 
of arbitration, and of other attempts at inter- 
national agreements. 

Ill 

A colleague of mine, and a high authority 
upon problems of insurance, in replying to 
my request for his criticisms upon this essay, 
has pointed out, as a serious objection to any 
plan for international insurance, that strong 
nations would be likely to prefer to insure 
themselves, while if only the weak nations 
joined in the international agreement, little 
would be accomplished. The direct rejoinder 
to this objection which is suggested in the 
text of the present essay, consists in pointing 
xxxiii 



INTRODUCTION 

out, that if there were any evils, whether or 
not evils of war, against which international 
insurance proved to be feasible, and if the 
plan here proposed began, even very 
modestly, to accomplish something in the 
way of bringing several nations together for 
purposes of mutual insurance, every such 
mutual insurance would involve the nations 
in new forms of cooperation, whose motives 
would be of the essentially peace-making 
kind analyzed in the text of this essay. 

But precisely in so far as such motives 
appeared at all as a result of international 
insurance, they would tend to make, more 
and more, national evils insurable. For if 
the nations begin thus to cooperate, they will, 
for the first time, learn what that sort of honor is 
which is involved in keeping agreements such 
as the insurance business exemplifies. What 
is called national honor is at present alto- 
gether too much a matter of capricious, 
private, and often merely personal judg- 
ment, simply because the nations are not as 
yet self-conscious moral beings. 
xxxiv 



INTRODUCTION 

They have not learned, as corporate enti- 
ties, what mutual loyalty is, because they 
have not begun to come together in those 
communities whose type is described in this 
essay. 

Personal honor is always the correlative 
of some practical form of loyalty, and of some 
recognition of an obligation, — a recognition 
that one acquires through actual business 
of the sort that does not go on in those dan- 
gerous relations which this essay somewhat 
elaborately analyzes. 

If the international body of trustees had 
in its charge any large trust in which a num- 
ber of nations were interested, these nations, 
working through their board, would become 
clearly conscious of the sort of loyalty and 
hence of the sort of honor which is found 
upon the highest levels of the business world. 

Thus a genuine and reasonable sense of 
honor would begin automatically to enter 
international relations. And the more it 
entered, the more chances there would be 
for mutual insurance. This mutual insur- 

xxxv 



INTRODUCTION 

ance, if it once extended to any of the evils 
of war at all, would tend in time to extend to 
more and more of them. And in this way 
the community of mankind would be formed, 
and would gradually grow by methods and 
in accordance with principles which are at 
once ideal and businesslike. 

So, even if one began with the mutual 
insurance of a comparatively few nations 
which were relatively weak, a new sort of 
international relation would begin to exist. 
And the more this relation existed, the more 
new international insurance enterprises would 
be possible. The whole very wonderful his- 
tory of insurance tends to show this, and to 
warrant the somewhat enthusiastic predic- 
tion with which this essay closes. 

IV 

One further remark remains for this Intro- 
duction to emphasize. Important as it seems 
to the present writer that some beginning 
should be made in inducing a group of na- 
tions to contribute to a common fund for 
xxx vi 



INTRODUCTION 

insurance against some of the evils of war 
(however few of such risks may be as yet 
insurable) — still this essay, in dealing with 
"war and insurance," certainly does not 
intend to confine itself solely to the possi- 
bility of insurance against the risks of war. 
A widely varied list of natural calamities 
against which insurance is possible has al- 
ready been presented. 

It is noticeable that any international 
insurance, which dealt with natural calami- 
ties, would involve a contract in which the 
individual nation was indeed to receive some 
definable insurance payment in case of cer- 
tain disasters ; but that, as a fact, the indi- 
vidual subjects would, in most such in- 
stances, be obviously, at least in part, 
the natural beneficiaries who would receive 
from their government the payments which 
would first come to the nation in ques- 
tion from the international board of insur- 
ance. 

From the nature of the case, the inter- 
national board would have no authority 
xxxvii 



INTRODUCTION 

whatever to direct any sovereign state how 
it was to distribute to its subjects funds 
delivered by it as proceeds of the payment 
made to it by the board, in accordance with 
the insurance policy. No possible interna- 
tional controversy could arise regarding the 
use which any sovereign state made of any 
of its insurance benefits when once they were 
received. 

But, on the whole, any modern sovereign 
state would be inevitably much influenced 
by the prevailing public opinion of its own 
people with regard to the distribution of 
its insurance funds. Consequently, the exist- 
ence of insurance benefits and, in turn, the 
existence of contributions made by the indi- 
vidual state to the international insurance 
fund, would be of great possible benefit to 
any individual state, in dealing with its most 
pressing social problems. For whether a na- 
tion was amply able to insure itself against a 
risk or not, an insurance policy would con- 
stitute a convenient means of providing, in 
advance, by a single financial device, for a 
xxxviii 



INTRODUCTION 

definite class of the needs or the risks of its 
subjects. 

A single example will suffice to indicate 
the way in which a system of international 
insurance, once established, would furnish an 
extremely simple mode — a wholly new sort 
of machinery — by means of which an indi- 
vidual state might deal with some of its most 
intimate internal problems and issues. 

The various forms of workmen's insur- 
ance are now becoming of great importance 
in the life of individual states. Such prob- 
lems are dealt with by different nations in 
modes which vary and ought to vary accord- 
ing to the special social problems which 
occupy the consciousness of the individual 
nations, and which also vary with the sys- 
tems of legislation and of government which 
characterize different nationalities. 

Every effort to apply the experience of one 
sovereign state with regard to the best form 
of workmen's insurance to the life of another 
sovereign state, has at present to involve 
new legislative or administrative decisions, 
xxxix 



INTRODUCTION 

and constitutional difficulties of the most 
varied sort. 

Now international insurance, without in 
the least interfering with the discretion, with 
the constitution, or with the independence 
of any nation concerned, would furnish, if it 
existed, a most convenient mode whereby 
various nations could learn from one an- 
other's experience, how to deal with such a 
problem as that of workmen's insurance, and 
how to apply what they learned through such 
experience to the special modes of adminis- 
tration and of legislation which were suited 
to the constitution of each state. 

Thus, suppose that the international board 
of trustees existed, and that the individual 
state was willing to contribute a fund to the 
general fund, thereby taking out a policy 
which insured to it, at suitable intervals, a 
payment adequate to cover the total cost of 
a given class of accidents occurring to its 
workmen in the various dangerous occupa- 
tions. The form of such a policy, its costs 
and conditions, would depend entirely upon 

xl 



INTRODUCTION 

what proposal the international board was 
prepared to entertain, and what contribu- 
tion to the common insurance fund the 
sovereign state in question was willing to 
make. The insurance payments, when duly 
made, would be wholly at the disposal of the 
state receiving them. 

Only, instead of devising some elaborate 
legislation of its own, hampered perhaps by 
numerous constitutional and legal restric- 
tions, determined by the whole past history 
of its laws and customs, the insured sovereign 
state would now have on its hands simply 
the problem of distributing the fund paid to 
it as the result of its workmen's insurance 
policy, to the people to whom, in its opinion, 
this sum should be equitably distributed. 

In a country such as the United States, 
where any plan for workmen's insurance of 
any type must at present pass through the 
slow ordeal of adjusting itself to the laws and 
customs of each separate state of the Union, 
and where a constitutional amendment, au- 
thorizing a general federal law on the subject, 

xli 



INTRODUCTION 

would involve awkward and possibly danger- 
ous complications, the whole subject could be 
much more simply dealt with if the interna- 
tional board of insurance, after due investi- 
gation of the facts about accidents, about 
old age, or about any other topic involving 
matters of interest to bodies of workmen in 
any state of the Union, named, not upon 
constitutional grounds, and not upon the 
ground of any treaty with any foreign power, 
a sum in return for which the international 
insurance board would be willing to pay, at 
stated intervals, into the treasury of the 
United States, a certain sum called for by a 
certain policy, in case the United States 
Congress simply appropriated the money to 
pay for the policy in question. 

Now there is no doubt that the United 
States is amply able to insure itself against 
all risks and expenses that are due to disease 
or to accident or to old age, in so far as these 
things affect its various classes of laborers. 
It is equally sure that manifold constitutional 
difficulties and varieties of custom he in the 

xlii 



INTRODUCTION 

way of carrying through any scheme affect- 
ing workmen's insurance throughout the vari- 
ous states of the American Union. 

It would be, therefore, of advantage to the 
United States if an international insurance 
board existed, and if it had the opportunity 
to pay for any policy that might at any time 
seem good to it affecting workmen's insur- 
ance anywhere within its borders. For the 
constitutional difficulties and the varieties 
of state legislation which stand in the way 
of carrying out any one plan for workmen's 
insurance in the United States would not 
stand in the way of a plan for appropriating 
a certain sum to be paid by the authority 
of Congress to the international insurance 
board. Nor would such difficulties be nearly 
as great when the problem arose as to how 
the proceeds received from such a policy 
were to be distributed to individual workmen 
throughout the United States, or to any part 
of it. The insurance policy would not be 
needed as a financial investment. But it 
would furnish a new and valuable machinery 

xliii 



INTRODUCTION 

for devising and carrying out possible social 
reforms. 

This is but a single example. As soon as 
one considers the possible uses of an interna- 
tional insurance board, in case that, while it 
did its business with the nations, their indi- 
vidual subjects were the natural beneficiaries 
of the insurance in question, one sees that. 
without the least interference with the discre- 
tion or the independence of any nation, a vast 
simplification of the machinery whereby each 
nation might deal with its own social prob- 
lems would be furnished. 

While the various nations took out policies 
for any such social purpose by putting cer- 
tain sums in trust with the board, they would 
very naturally take counsel together, by com- 
paring their various modes of social insur- 
ance, and of other socially beneficent pro- 
cesses. Every word spoken in such counsel 
would tend toward mutual understanding among 
the nations and towards simplification of the 
social problems of each, or of the ways in which 
these problems were to be dealt with. Yet at 

xliv 



INTRODUCTION 

no moment would such conference in the 
least interfere with the honor of the indi- 
vidual nations, or involve new disputes, or 
stand in the way of any national ambi- 
tion. 

It will be clearly observed that the inter- 
national board of insurance would have no 
hostility to the growth of international arbi- 
tration, or to the authority of the Hague tri- 
bunal. Its existence would imply no hin- 
drance to any other influence that at pres- 
ent furthers, or that may in future further, the 
substitution of peace for war in international 
life. 

Therefore the strong nations could use, and 
could profitably use, international insurance 
quite as much and quite as hopefully as 
the weak. For it would provide them a 
new machinery for the financial care of re- 
forms. 

The more it was used, the more it would be- 
come useful. And the genuine community of 
mankind would indeed be begun, not as a 
merely fantastic hope, but as an institution 

xlv 



INTRODUCTION 

whereby part of the world's daily business 
was done. 

It seems well to close this Introduction 
with the words of a great authority on the 
theory of insurance, — words by which the 
present writer's thoughts have been con- 
stantly guided in the writing of this essay. 
The words are those of Charlton Thomas 
Lewis, Ph.D. They appear in the article 
on "Insurance," which the eleventh edition 
of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" prints on 
page 658 of Volume XIV: — 

"The value of insurance as an institution 
cannot be measured by figures. No direct 
balance-sheet of profit and loss can exhibit 
its utility. The insurance contract produces 
no wealth. It represents only expenditure. 
If a thousand men insure themselves against 
any contingency, then, whether or not the 
dreaded event occurs to any, they will in the 
aggregate be poorer, as the direct result-, by 
the exact cost of the machinery for effect- 
ing it. The distribution of property is 
changed, its sum is not increased. But the 

xlvi 



INTRODUCTION 

results in the social economy, the substitu- 
tion of reasonable foresight and confidence 
for apprehension and the sense of hazard, the 
large elimination of chance from business 
and conduct have a supreme value. The 
direct contribution of insurance to civili- 
zation is made, not in visible wealth, but in 
the intangible and immeasurable forces of 
character on which civilization itself is 
founded. It is preeminently a modern insti- 
tution. Some two centuries ago it had 
begun to influence centers of trade, but the 
mass of civilized men had no conception of its 
meaning. Its general application and popu- 
lar acceptance began within the first half of 
the 19th century, and its commercial and 
social importance have multiplied a hundred- 
fold within living memory. It has done 
more than all gifts of impulsive charity to 
foster a sense of human brotherhood and of 
common interests. It has done more than 
all repressive legislation to destroy the gam- 
bling spirit. It is impossible to conceive 
of our civilization in its full vigor and pro- 

xlvii 



INTRODUCTION 

gressive power without this principle, which 
unites the fundamental law of practical econ- 
omy, that he best serves humanity who best 
serves himself, with the golden rule of reli- 
gion, 'Bear ye one another's burdens." 



xlviii 



WAR AND INSURANCE 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

/^i REAT tragedies are great opportunities. 
^^ The new griefs which to-day beset the 
civilized nations call for new reflections and 
for new inventions. Our past methods of 
furthering the cause of peace on earth have 
disappointed many hopes that, in their day, 
seemed both fascinating and reasonable. We 
must not expect, at any time in the near 
future, to make an entire end of war, but we 
need to understand better than we now do the 
depth, the gravity, and the true nature of 
the motives which have thus far made war- 
like tendencies so persistent in the life of 
mankind. We also need to discover, if we 
can, methods not yet tried, whereby the wars 
of the nations may be gradually rendered 
less destructive, and less willful. 

This essay is to be devoted to both the 
tasks thus indicated. The main part of this 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

paper will give an account of some of the 
familiar, but too little heeded, and too ill 
defined reasons why wars are, despite our 
civilization, so fatally recurrent incidents of 
our international life. This first part of our 
paper must be somewhat lengthily stated; 
for, as the old Buddhist scripture says : 

" Long is the night to him who is awake ; long is a 
mile to him who is tired ; long is life to the foolish who 
do not know the true law." 1 

And our poor human nature is still on the 
level on which we are often wakeful in the 
night and often have yet to seek after the 
knowledge of the true law which may some 
day bring us nearer to the life of peace. 

This earlier and also lengthier part of our 
paper will gradually lead us, however, to the 
definition of some principles bearing on a 
fragment of the true law both of war and of 
peace. And so far this paper will be a con- 
tribution to what has been called, by the 
Dutch Ethnologist Steinmetz, the "Philos- 
ophy of War." But, at the very close of our 

1 Max Muller, " Sacred Books of the East," Vol. X, p. 20. 

2 



INTRODUCTION 

discussion, we shall be led to an application 
of these principles which I believe to be in 
certain respects new. We shall then, in the 
second and much shorter part of our discus- 
sion, propose a method of practically further- 
ing the gradual growth and reenforcement of 
the cause of peace on earth. This method 
has not yet been tried. I believe that the 
principles upon which it is founded are, in 
certain concrete instances, as familiar to the 
modern civilized man as are his most char- 
acteristic forms of prudence, of thrift, and of 
cooperation. But the application of these 
principles to the philosophy of war remains 
still inadequate ; and, at the present moment, 
this field for further efforts to form plans that 
look towards peace is still open. This paper 
will thus close with a brief indication of the 
nature of one such plan. 



THE UTOPIA OF UNIVERSAL PEACE 

rTIO propose any way for furthering the 
cause of universal peace is to arouse the 
objection that all such proposals, if definite 
in their formulation, and universal in their 
intention, have thus far always proved Uto- 
pian. As has often been asserted, man ap- 
pears in history as essentially a fighting ani- 
mal. When he becomes civilized, he changes, 
indeed, the fashion of his fighting, and, in 
the course of time, gradually improves both 
the morals and the methods of his warfare. 
Cruelty, pillage, and extermination become 
less prominent amongst the aims which ab- 
sorb the warrior's mind. Wars are waged for 
purposes which become more ideal as time 
goes on. Humanity of mood directs, in a 
measure, the plans of rival nations. The 
modern national spirit itself sometimes appears 

4 



THE UTOPIA OF UNIVERSAL PEACE 

to be a sort of preparation for some larger 
enthusiasm which, as we often hope, may, in 
a far-off future age, make the community 
of mankind its main object of fraternal devo- 
tion, and the whole earth its country. 

But, on the other hand, as the nations grow 
in power and in self -consciousness, some of the 
disastrous but profoundly human motives 
which most tend to make men fight with their 
neighbors, not only survive in the midst of 
the highest cultivation which we have yet 
reached, but are even intensified by the 
very intelligence, by the loyalty, and by 
the resoluteness, which lie at the basis of 
what our civilization most needs and prizes. 
Nobody can rightly consider the problem 
of war who regards the war spirit as a mere 
relic of barbarism, or as due solely to the evil 
side of our nature. The mystery of war and 
of its fascination can be fathomed only in case 
we first observe that although, of old, wars 
were often due in a large part to the passions 
and ambitions of rulers and of the ruling 
classes of the warring peoples, modern wars, 

5 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

however much princes may take part in their 
beginnings, are, on the whole, waged by 
peoples, and are in part the expressions of 
the recently acquired power of an intelligent 
democracy. Ancient wars were frequently 
the result of ignorance, and of blind popular 
passion, of superstition, or of the greed of 
individuals. Modern wars are in many cases 
deliberately and thoughtfully planned by 
patriots who love their country's honor, who 
are clearly conscious of well-formulated ideals 
which they think righteous, and who fight 
in the name of the freedom of the people, 
and in the service of what they suppose to be 
the highest human culture. World-wide sym- 
pathies do not prevent warlike passions from 
seeming to many who cultivate them not 
qnly necessary, but morally indispensable; 
not only honorable, but holy ; not only fasci- 
nating, but rational. 

Let us remember then that, whatever the 
mere form of any national government may 
be, it is at present the democracy itself, or 
at all events, the prevailing popular will, 

6 



THE UTOPIA OF UNIVERSAL PEACE 

however it is expressed, which, in the more 
warlike modern nations, actually prepares 
for war, which dreams of it in advance, which 
tries cheerfully to bear the burdens of its 
expenses, which glories in its risks and in its 
victories, and which frequently and con- 
sciously justifies it as the highest, as the com- 
pletest, and so as the most ethical expression of 
national loyalty. Let us remember too that 
modern democracy, or whatever else expresses 
the will of a people, does this not because it 
lacks a sympathetic interest in the concerns 
and in the sentiments of the men of other 
nations, but because our modern form of 
human solidarity is such that international 
hate travels as far, as fast, and as persuasively 
as does love. The civilized world thrills 
with sympathy for the calamities of obscure 
or of distant men; but it also thrills with a 
common admiration for high spirit, and for 
warlike enthusiasm. Sympathy implies a dis- 
position to imitate, and so, just because of 
our present degree of solidarity, we tend to 
imitate whatever is impressively vigorous 

7 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

about the will and the power of interesting 
men and nations. Such imitation is, in many 
cases, an imitation of the war spirit. 

Only in case we keep in mind both the vast 
masses of popular interest and the very high 
grade of intelligence which are now devoted, 
in many great nations, to the cultivation of 
warlike motives, and to the preparation for 
war, can we see how far away is the utopia 
of universal peace. 

As a fact, the advance of civilization not 
only brings with it motives which tend to 
check and to control the barbarous aspects of 
war, but also motives, some of them new, 
which tend to make war appear, to many 
individuals and nations, more ideal, more 
righteous, more significant, than ever. The 
modern world, wherein every great human 
experience of passion, of sorrow, and of love 
arouses a warm response in the most distant 
parts of the inhabited earth, — this same 
world echoes the warlike passions as readily 
as it does the humane ones, longs to imitate 
the powerful peoples as well as to relieve 

8 



THE UTOPIA OF UNIVERSAL PEACE 

the sufferers from an earthquake, and is 
stirred by its far-reaching rivalries as much as 
by its other expressions of solidarity. Its 
social problems are common to all the civ- 
ilized lands ; but so too are the dispositions 
to encourage and to feel the contrasts of 
races, and the rivalries of commerce and of 
cultivation. The democracies are vast ; but 
so too are the conflicting interests for which 
these democracies are ready to fight. Science 
brings all men near to each other ; but science 
also originates new industrial arts, and these 
arts can be used for war as well as for peace. 
Civilization makes men more thoughtful about 
both social and moral issues. But such 
thoughtfulness, if once inspired by patriotism, 
and by international jealousies, can both 
counsel and wage war deliberately, and with a 
self-righteous assurance such as our element- 
ally passionate or simply superstitious ances- 
tors never knew. 

So, of themselves, neither cultivation, nor 
thoughtfulness, nor humane breadth of sym- 
pathies, nor the discoveries of science, nor the 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

aspirations of the democracy, have been able 
to make wars cease on the earth. Modern 
wars may, as we now know, become more 
widespread, more democratic in spirit, more 
ideally self-righteous, than ever they were 
before. 

Whoever undertakes, then, to plan any 
method of decreasing the evils of war, must 
take account of these facts and must consider 
how deeply rooted in civilized man the ten- 
dency towards war still remains. One may 
well begin such an enterprise by asking 
whether it is not indeed altogether hopeless. 
In view of the facts thus summarily sketched, 
is not this great disease of mankind, the love 
of war, beyond cure, and perhaps beyond any 
lasting relief ? 

And yet: The spectator who to-day wit- 
nesses the tragedy entitled "Man," watches 
a scene wherein both the events and the char- 
acters arouse, side by side with many old 
emotions and reflections, certain wholly new 
movings of pity, of fear, and of wonder. 
Can one remain a merely passive spectator? 

10 



THE UTOPIA OF UNIVERSAL PEACE 

Must one not seek, at least in imagination, 
some more active means whereby he may 
transform his pity into charity, his fear into 
an inspiring hope, his wonder into some sort 
of interpretation of the meaning of what he 
witnesses ? In such an effort lies the task of 
this essay. 



11 



II 

THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

rilHE facts just cited, the prominence of 
warlike motives in modern men, the 
stubborn survival in culture of the ten- 
dencies which express themselves in arma- 
ments, in the jealousies of nations, and in 
actual wars, — all these things call for further 
characterization in terms of a principle which 
shall be sufficiently general in its scope, and 
sufficiently important in its practical appli- 
cations, to serve as a guide in our search for 
a way of giving to humanity a measure of 
relief from its most dangerous social burdens. 
The higher religions have long sought for 
an expression of such a principle. Two of 
them in particular, namely Buddhism and 
Christianity, have found and used a formula 
which is, in fact, extremely general in its 
statement, and very highly practical in its 

12 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

demands, as well as in some of its applications. 
In its Christian expression this formula is as 
familiar as is its failure to guide men, and lies 
at the basis of the counsel which Christian 
teachers of the most various creeds daily give 
to each of the faithful regarding his relation 
to his fellow man. Just because of this 
familiarity of the best known forms of the 
Christian formula, we may be aided to make 
the principle in question momentarily vivid 
in our minds, if we here refer to one of the 
simplest and most popular of the scriptures 
of the original Southern Buddhism, the work 
from which I have already quoted the passage 
about those who find the night long. The 
name of this book is the Dhammapada. 
Let me cite from this scripture a mere frag- 
ment of a single text. At a moment when 
the world is at war, this ancient Buddhist 
word may awaken, by the very contrast 
between its spirit and that of the passing 
mood of modern European patriots, a com- 
ment which will help us to see where our real 
problem lies : — 

13 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

" ' He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he 
robbed me ' ; — in those who do not harbor such 
thoughts hatred will cease. 

" For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time : 
hatred ceases by love, this is an old rule." 1 

Such, then, is the formulation of the greatest 
of human practical problems by the Dham- 
mapada ; such is the solution of this problem 
which that ancient Buddhist scripture proposed, 
several hundred years before Christ. You 
have but to think of the best known words 
of the parables and of the Sermon on the 
Mount in order to recall other and now dis- 
tinctively Christian forms of this same rule 
for ending wars and for saving mankind. 
"Little children, love one another:" these 
words, in another part of the New Testament, 
restate this view of the escape from all the 
horrors which war entails. In an equally 
simple, and, as I may at once add, in an equally 
imperfect shape, Tolstoi's version of the 
Christian spirit not long since filled with a 
sad longing the very European world whose 

1 Max Muller, " Sacred" Books of the East," Vol. X, p. 5. 

14 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

destinies have, since then, been so domi- 
nated by preparation for war, and by acts 
of war. 

Considered by itself, and apart from all 
theological formulations, this lore which is 
common to Buddhism and to Christianity may 
be summed up in the assertion that the moral 
destiny of man depends upon a certain pair 
of relations, — the relation of love towards 
his neighbor, — and the relation of hate. 
In so far as man is dominated by the hate- 
relation, this doctrine tells us that he is lost. 
In so far as the love-relation becomes his 
guide, he is, according to the same teaching, 
saved ; for then he enters the realm of inner 
as well as of outer peace, and his life wins its 
only true sense, its only possible fulfillment. 
There is, then, so this view of life teaches, a 
good relation of man to his neighbor; it is 
the relation of lover to beloved. There is 
a relation to his neighbor which is not only 
dangerous, but deadly to man; and that is 
the relation of an enemy to the neighbor 
whom he hates. The whole problem of life 

15 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

lies here. Let men become lovers, and then 
whatever men's mere fortunes may be, all is 
well. Let them remain enemies, and then 
not only wars are waged, but also the shadow 
of death is upon the whole inner and outer 
life of man. The dead lie waiting burial. 
The mourners wail and cannot be comforted. 
Such,. I say. is the substance of that view of 
our problem which Christianity and Southern 
Buddhism share in common. 

Now this doctrine of life is so ancient, and 
is. in mere words, so widely accepted, that 
just because we are deadened by the mere 
repetition of such words, we have difficulty 
in making very vivid to our minds how far 
this common Buddhist and Christian lore 
is from telling us the whole truth about the 
way whereby the winning of peace and the 
fruitful union of human souls is to be sought, 
if ever such peace and union is to take place 
in the world of daily life at all. 

In order to illustrate this contrast between 
real life and this ideal of life, let us simply 
fancy that some supernatural stranger, having 

16 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

an angel's tongue, and bearing a flag of truce, 
appears to-day upon a battlefield in Belgium 
or in Servia, and, having first somehow mirac- 
ulously caused the conflict to cease for a 
time, announces to all present, so that they 
hear him, the news of how he has in his pos- 
session the formula for ending all wars, includ- 
ing the present strife on this field. Let him 
then read, over the heaps of the wounded and 
of the dead as they lie there the words I have 
just read from the Dhammapada : — 

"Hatred does not cease by hatred; hatred ceases 
by love ; this is an old rule." 

As soon as this angel of peace has finished 
his message and has departed, the warriors, 
so far as they are not yet helpless, will of 
course return to the tasks wherein they find 
their honor and their duty, as well as their 
own fierce joy and pain, their own bitter 
weariness, and their own passionate obedience 
and devotion. As they do so, will they not 
feel, along with us the spectators, that the 
words of this angel visitant, spoken during 
c 17 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

the brief truce, are not only impotent, but 
irrelevant ? 

In fact, these words do not even touch, 
by themselves, upon the real practical prob- 
lem of this battlefield and of all battlefields. 

This problem obviously is : how shall the 
hate-relation come to be forgotten, and how 
shall the love-relation come to be the dominant 
motive of a human life such as is ours ? When 
not only our worst motives, but also our 
patriotism, our love of all that we hold dearest, 
our honor, — when all these counsel us, if we 
be men, to treat as enemies those who are 
the foes of this honor, we see that we are in 
the presence not only of passion, but of fate ; 
and that this passive form of the law of love 
can successfully address its words only to 
those who, like the Buddhist monks, or like 
the Christian saints of the desert, have first 
abandoned, as Schopenhauer said, the will 
to live, have parted company with whatever 
makes a man's character vigorously active 
and unsparingly and constructively creative; 
have also parted company with whatever 

18 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

makes us ready to be like those angels who 
excel in strength. Hate, after all, is but one 
aspect of war. War's other aspect, what 
one may call its spiritual aspect, is the loyalty 
to which it gives active employment, the fear- 
less faith in life which it converts into works, 
the endurance which it transforms into crea- 
tive deeds. In this other aspect of war lies 
its appeal to what is best in man. 

The real problems of war cannot be solved, 
then, merely in terms of this contrast between 
the love-relation and the hate-relation, and 
in terms of the mere condemnation of the 
hate-relation. For there are human relations 
which call out our most active loyalty, our 
most constructive devotion, our highest 
energy, and which cannot be defined merely 
in terms of the contrast between loving and 
hating a man's individual neighbor. Such 
are the human relations which are exemplified 
when many men are together devoted to 
one common although by chance unwarlike 
task, such as the task of an art, or of a science, 
or of some church wherein there is present a 

19 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

genuine communion of the faithful. Such 
tasks may indeed be called tasks of love, but 
they are not tasks of the merely self -forgetting 
and passive love which the Dhammapada 
contrasts with hate. They are the tasks of 
a sort of Pauline charity whose object is not 
merely the individual neighbor, but a whole 
community of many men viewed as a super- 
personal, and yet also as somehow a personal 
being. The one who loves in this spirit 
loves a spiritual body wherein individual 
men exist as members, and wherein he also 
is a member. He seeks not his own, but he 
loves, as Paul said, "Not after the flesh but 
after the spirit." He loves as Paul also said 
that Christ loved the church. Therefore he 
is above both the hates and the loves which 
contrast and which contend on the battle- 
field. When a company of artists or of scien- 
tific men work together upon the common 
tasks of their calling, they are not merely, as 
"little children," loving one another, nor yet 
are they hating, each his neighbor. Their 
human relations are those of the loyalty of 

20 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

individuals to the communities wherein the 
true tasks of life are found. The relation 
which is here present is expressed in the devo- 
tion of the individual's life to the spirit of 
some community, wherein he lives and moves 
and has his being. 

Now such human relations, namely those 
which bind a patriot to his country, a warrior 
to his service, an artist to the community 
of all who love art, a scientific man to the 
community of all who study nature, these 
are indeed, as we have said, the highest 
human relations. These express the best in 
man. I have already said that the motives 
underlying these human relations often lead 
to the worst of warlike hatreds. This is as 
sad a fact as it is prominent in human history. 
But we have gained something for the under- 
standing of our problem if we have first seen 
that this problem involves not merely the 
contrast between love and hate, but the con- 
trast between those relations which an in- 
dividual man bears to his individual neighbor, 
and the relation which a patriot bears to his 

21 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

country, or the individually faithful saint to 
the visible or invisible church to which, as 
he believes, all the faithful belong. 

It is therefore not by mere love of one's 
neighbor that hatred can be made to cease. 
And in fact historical Christianity has never 
been merely a religion of such passive love. 
The Pauline charity involves a relation of 
the individual to the whole mystical body 
of the faithful. This relation is viewed by 
Paul as so important that he tells us how, 
without this charity, without this relation 
of the believer to the whole spiritual body 
of the faithful, no form of the love of an 
individual man for his neighbor, no giving 
of one's body to be burned, would really 
profit either a man or his neighbor in any 
respect. The Pauline charity involves a rela- 
tion whose type profoundly differs from the 
type which the author of the Dhammapada 
has in mind. Paul does not say: "Think of 
that neighbor yonder, and love him ; and then 
the hate-thoughts and the wars will cease." 
Paul says, in substance, "Be loyal to the 

22 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

spiritual body whereof you are a member. 
Gird on the whole armor of loyalty. Practice, 
meanwhile, not mere self-sacrifice, but posi- 
tive virtues which, in form at least, are essen- 
tially although not merely militant. And 
then you will rise above petty hate as much 
as above merely private and individual love. 
You will perhaps wage war, but not because 
you are greedy; rather because you love the 
union, the community of all the loyal, the 
spiritual body of those who are one in faith 
and in service. Then you will be a man with 
a country; and for your country you will 
be ready, on occasion, both to fight and 
to die. 

If our angel visitor on the battlefield pro- 
claimed the words of Paul rather than those 
of the Dhammapada, he would express what 
I believe to be the really higher spirit of his- 
torical Christianity. And the warriors, before 
they returned to their awful tasks, would feel 
that, while he had not indeed justified the 
slaughter of men as anything that is in itself 
a good, he had given them some glimpse of 

23 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

the reason why the warlike spirit has its 
spiritual meaning, as well as its tragic horror 
of great darkness. He would have hinted 
that, if ever relief is to come to humanity's 
great woe of combat, it will come not merely 
through a cessation of hate and a prevalence 
of love for individual men, but through the 
growth of some higher type of loyalty, which 
shall absorb the men of the future so that the 
service of the community of all mankind will 
at last become their great obsession, while 
this world-patriotism, when it comes, will 
remain still as active, and on occasion as 
militant and as businesslike in its plans and 
in its devotion as is now the love of warring 
patriots for their mutually hostile countries. 

In facing the problem as to how this possible 
future world-patriotism, how this distant but 
eagerly desired result can ever come to be, 
I will not say reached, but gradually ap- 
proached, we have gained, I believe, some- 
thing, however little, by seeing that we have 
not here chiefly to do with two contrasting 
relations of pairs of individual men, namely 

24 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

the love-relation, and the hate-relation. Our 
fiction of the angel visitant on the Belgium 
or Servian battlefield helps to remind us 
wherein consists the contrast between his 
advice, as we first stated it, and the sort of 
counsel which we ourselves in the present 
discussion are seeking. He says, to every 
warrior: "Love your neighbor, even if he 
has thus far been your enemy. Since you 
cannot love him and also willfully kill him, you 
have only to follow, all of you at once, my 
word, and then not only this, but all battles 
will automatically cease. You will all return 
to your homes. Then peace will come on 
earth." 

But, as we have seen, the instinctive senti- 
ment which the warriors, after their momen- 
tary truce, and even while the thunders of 
the captains and the shouting begin again, 
will feel (whether they have wit and patience 
to articulate their reply or not) , — this senti- 
ment may well take the form of saying : 
"I am not merely related to my neighbor 
here, who seeks my life as I seek his, and who 

25 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

is a hateful man hunter as I also am. My 
highest and deepest relations are to my coun- 
try and to its allies and foes, to our common 
service, to my honor, and (if you will) to our 
forefathers and to our posterity, yes to the 
whole world of man." 

And so, for the warriors, and for us who 
now study the philosophy of war, the genuine 
problem relates not so much to the contrast 
between the love-relation and the hate-rela- 
tion, as to the contrast between our relations 
to our individual neighbors, and our relations 
to our honor, or to our duty, or to our country, 
or to mankind, or to whatever community 
you may choose to consider. 

Here, at length, we enter the region where 
the issues of war and of peace must be faced 
and thought out, if anywhere we are to find 
a reasonable guide towards a solution. My 
greatest question is not: "Do I love my 
neighbor or do I hate him?" but "Have I, or 
have I not the right, the worthy, the saving 
relation to my community, to my family, to 
my country, to mankind?" If we want to 

26 



THE NEIGHBOR: LOVE AND HATE 

learn to answer this question, we next need 
to consider some very plain and familiar, but 
neglected, facts about the nature of com- 
munities, and about the social relations of 
men. 



27 



J 



III 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS AND 
COMMUNITIES 

T^ANT, in one of his more practical and 
popular works, has used a well-known 
expression, which has often been cited, but 
which has little been heeded. This expression 
bears upon the natural relation of the individ- 
ual man to his individual neighbor. Hobbes, 
in the seventeenth century, had said :> "By 
nature every man is at war with his neighbor. 
Only some special social device can make him 
behave as if he were a peaceful creature." 
Rousseau, in Kant's own time, had asserted 
that by nature men love to be in harmony 
with one another, so that only the artificial 
customs of society are the source of the mutual 
hatreds and rivalries which lead to war. Kant, 
in the remark to which I now refer, goes deeper 
than both of these conflicting theses. Kant 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS 

says, in substance: "By nature man both 
hates and loves his neighbor." And Kant 
goes on to point out that, in real life, each of 
these tendencies, the loving tendency as well -¥• 
as the hating tendency, actually both nour- 
ishes and inflames the other. 

For man, as a social animal, cannot do 
without his neighbor. In solitude he pines 
or starves. It is not good for man to be alone. 
Yet, if you give man a companion, it is equally 
natural that the two should, erelong, quarrel ! 

Their quarrel need not be due to the fact 
that they are naturally malicious. But,"per- 
haps by mere accident, they soon get in each 
other's way. Then they easily begin to 
quarrel, and their quarrel tends to inflame its 
own motives. Hence Kant's formula for the 
natural relations of a pair of human beings 
is that the natural man can "Neither suffer 
his fellow nor do without him." Deprive 
a man of his mate, and he finds the world 
intolerably lonesome. Give him a com- 
panion, and the two irritate each other. For, 
if only by mere accident, they erelong become 

29 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

rivals in some quest ; or perhaps they interrupt 
each other in a conversation and then each, 
if sufficiently eager, begins to say (out of pure 
love both for his fellow and for the sound of 
his own voice) : "Do not interrupt me. 
Listen to me." Herewith begins a possible 
quarrel. Such a quarrel, if two nations were 
concerned, might lead to war. 

This last example of social friction is not 
Kant's example, but it well illustrates why what 
one may call the dyadic, the dual, the bilateral 
relations of man and man, of each man to his 
neighbor, are relations fraught with social dan- 
ger. A pair of men is what I may call an 
essentially dangerous community. 

A man may, at any time, love his neighbor. 
They may both feel kindly towards each other. 
It may be that neither is malicious, that 
neither is, as people say, a totally selfish 
creature. All that is needed, however, to 
make serious friction possible between the 
two men is that each shall be active, and 
watchful, and that he shall have some sort 
of "business and desire, such as they are." 

30 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS 

It is tolerably certain that, if this condition 
is fulfilled, the business and desire of the two 
men shall be, in whatever way you please, 
different, and in some way contrasting. Even 
if they love each other, they will then be dis- 
posed not to do precisely the same thing at 
the same time. Or if, as in a conversation 
between two people, each of them does desire 
to say, at any moment, the very same thing 
which the other desires to say, this same act 
will have different relations to the conversation 
according to the intents which each of them 
has as he speaks to the other. 

Now, in any such case, the perfectly natural, 
and in fact inevitable contrast, between the 
acts, or between the results of action, on the 
part of the two neighbors who love each other, 
will of itself tend to create friction. 

A certain social tension is therefore a per- 
fectly natural accompaniment of any concrete 
social relation between two people. How- 
ever friendly they are, at the outset of a social 
task, to disagree in some respect is the normal 
result of any social intercourse between two 

31 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

neighbors. If two men are neighbors, each 
of them inevitably tends, in some respect, 
to get in the other's way. 

Let the two eager speakers, who long to 
talk together, but who automatically tend 
to interrupt each other, just because each 
loves to have the other as his listener, let 
them serve as a perfectly elementary example 
of a tendency which you find assuming all 
grades of importance, from the most trivial 
to a furious quarrel which may lead to a death 
grip of two fighters, or to a war between two 
nations. 

There is, therefore, a law of the social 
intercourse between the members of a pair 
of individual men, or (for that matter) of the 
social intercourse between the members of a 
pair of individual groups or nations of men, — 
a law for which I have long used the name : 
The law not only of the danger, but also of the 
original sin, of the dual, or dyadic social rela- 
tions of men. The law is this : When two 
men, or two consolidated groups of men, are 
set at some such social task as observing each 

32 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS 

other, or playing a game together, or debating 
a question, or buying and selling, or borrowing 
and lending, or hunting for food, or even when 
they explicitly undertake the task of helping 
each other, then, at any one stage of this 
dual or bilateral activity, one of the two 
will indeed be either loving the other, or 
else not loving him. And when a new and 
interesting relation to a neighbor first comes 
in sight, love is quite as natural as is 
antipathy. 

But as the two individuals pass from one 
stage to another of the activity in question, 
the natural contrast between the two men or 
groups tends to lead to some mutual interrup- 
tion, of jostling, or to some other vexatious 
contrast of behavior. Each therefore tends, 
in some fashion, to surprise the other pain- 
fully, to snub his activities, and so to get in 
the other's way. We naturally do such things 
not because we are by nature either mainly 
selfish or primarily malicious or even greedy. 
We do all this merely because, if taken in 
pairs, we are, in each pair, two different and 
d 33 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

contrasting people or groups. Our whole 
self -consciousness, in fact, depends upon not- 
ing how different from our neighbors each of 
us is. But contrasts that strongly interest 
us can easily become unpleasant. There- 
fore mutual love and agreement between the 
members of a pair of human beings is an easily 
interrupted relation. Our differences can 
readily come at any moment to seem mutual 
challenges. If love between a pair of friends 
survives such endless trials, it does so through 
patience, or through the aid of other rela- 
tions which are naturally more stable, or 
because love takes on the form of true loyalty. 
But loyalty, which is the lore of a self for an 
united community, always involves relations 
which concern more than two people. 

Taken by itself, the mutual love of a mere 
pair of people tends, like physical energy, to 
run downhill ; to be baffled by personal con- 
trasts, to be thwarted by mutual interruptions, 
to give place to a consciousness of painful 
differences, to be worn out by time. As 
Griselda says to her cruel lord : — 

34 






# 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS 

"But sooth is said ; algate I find it true, 
For in effect it proved is on me, 
Love is not old as when that it is new." 



This assertion constitutes the first half of the 
law of the original sin of the dyadic human 
relations. Love, when it is a merely dyadic 
. relation between a pair of lovers, is essentially 
unstable and inconstant. For the two tend 
in the long run to interrupt, to bore, or collide 
each with the other. 

\S The second half of our law is easily stated. 
y\ When mutual friction once arises between 
a pair of lovers or of rivals or of individuals 
otherwise interestingly related, whether they 
be men or groups of men, the friction tends to 
increase, unless some other relation inter- 
venes, or unless more than a pair of members 
belong to the community wherein mutual 
love ought to be sustained, or mutual jealousy 
averted. 

"Never any more 
While I live, 
Need I hope to see his face 
As before. 

35 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

Once his love grown chill, 
Mine may strive — 

Bitterly we reembrace, 
Single still." 



So laments the lonely wife in Browning's 
" Men and Women." The situation is human. 
It daily occurs, and is even commonplace. 
It illustrates the natural fortune of. a pair 
either of lovers or of human beings otherwise 
related, who remain merely a pair. When, 
through any accident, mutual antipathy 
chances to arise in such a pair, then each of 
the members of the now distracted community 
of two irritates the other to new antipathies. 
Thus in such cases love grows old while hate 
renews its impish youth. 

The only possible renewal of the youth of 
such an old love depends upon establishing 
new and creative social ties between the two 
who once loved, or else upon enlarging and 
enriching the community, so that it is no 
longer merely a community of two. 

But at this moment we are reminded of a 
new consideration. As a fact, the natural 

36 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS 

unit of human society, in all its stages of evo- 
lution, is the family. But the normal family 
V? is not a pair, but is at the least a triad, a 
group of three persons: Father, Mother, 
Child. What one might call the molecule of 
the most lasting and simply instinctive human 
social groups is, so to speak, an union wherein 
at least three individual persons, three social 
atoms, or, in higher stages, three social groups, 
participate. In such a community love can 
indeed readily assume its more stable forms, 
and can turn into a more ideal loyalty. In 
a mere pair of persons, love, while frequently 
both present and intense, is essentially un- 
stable; while hate, when once it appears, 
tends to grow with what it feeds on, namely 
with the natural contrasts between individuals, 
and because of their mutual interruptions, 
and by virtue of the constantly growing con- 
sciousness wherewith each of the two anti- 
pathetic persons observes how the other 
regards him. But in the family triad, the 
winning and common care for the child 
may charm away many of the most beset- 

37 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

ting influences that tend to wreck home 
unity. 

Let us sum up the results thus far reached : 
The advice which the Dhammapada gives 
us, about love and hate, ignores an essential 
fact, namely, the fact of the dangerousness 
of the dyadic human relations; and forgets 
this reason why antipathy is so readily 
growing a weed in our social relations. We 
hate not merely because we remember injuries. 
Many of our sources of antipathy seem to be, 
in the single case, much more petty than is 
a desire for revenge ; but are actually deeper 
in their meaning than is such a desire. Very 
often we tend to hate simply because there 
are so many of us, and because we are so dif- 
ferent one from the other; and so because, 
when we are taken in pairs, we thus appear 
in each pair as interrupters and intruders, 
each member of the pair annoying his fellow 
even while trying to express whatever love he 
chances to possess for the other, and each em- 
phasizing his own hatred when he feels it, by 
dwelling on these dual or bilateral contrasts. 

38 



H 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS 

Such is thus far our result ; here then is the 
fundamental principle of the philosophy of 
war. The deepest reason why war is so per- 
sistent is that the nations, thus far in history, 
are related chiefly in pairs, — pairs of com- 
mercial rivals, pairs of borrowers and lenders, 
pairs of stronger and weaker nations, pairs of 
superiors and inferiors, pairs of plunderers who 
do not understand each the other, — pairs of 
plotters, each of whom suspects his opponent. 

And the deepest reason why what is best 
in individual men does not destroy but often 
inflames the warlike spirit, lies in the fact 
that the best in individual men depends upon 
their loyalty to their own groups, upon their 
patriotism, and also upon their interest in 
groups which are not mere pairs. In such 
interests in groups which are larger and richer 
than pairs, consists men's very desire for human 
solidarity. For human unions can become 
stable and fruitful only through the establish- 
ment of relations which are very different from 
the dangerous dyadic relations of lovers, of 
rivals, and of warriors. 

39 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

The sound advice to men is then not com- 
pletely expressed by the word : "Little 
children, love one another" ; but rather by the 
Pauline advice to love some united community 
which has the characters ascribed by Paul to 
the church. War itself persists because the 
nations still cultivate dyadic relations too ex- 
clusively . 

We have thus seen wherein lies the basis 
of the problem of war. War is simply one 
case whereby to illustrate how dangerous the 
dyadic relations are in the social world ; 
and how dangerous a community is one which 
has the form of a pair either of individual men 
or individual nations. 

In the social world which consists of pairs, 
love indeed finds many temporary dwelling 
places ; but it also finds no continuing city, 
and so has to seek in Utopia for a city out of 
sight; while hate is indeed not universal, 
and not all powerful, but is grounded in the 
natural diversities and in the mutual observa- 
tions of men, and is therefore always ready to 
be aroused in those who had been, until it 

40 



THE DANGEROUS SOCIAL RELATIONS 

appeared, friends and brothers ; while if once 
aroused, hate tends to grow more intense and 
distracting as it observes its own life. In 
those communities which are mere pairs, time 
is the consumer of love but the nourisher of 
hate. Love between the members of a mere 
pair tends to wax old as does a garment; 
while hate, when once it comes, flourishes in 
a malicious youth, witch-like and death- 
dealing. 



41 



IV 

THE COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETATION 

rTIHE outlook for humanity would indeed be 
dark, if our social relations were limited 
to mere pairs of individuals or of nations or 
of other groups of men, whether petty or 
vast. But, as a fact, this is not the case. 

We have already seen that there is at least 
one human community which has characters 
and relations such as no mere pair of human 
beings can possibly possess. This is the com- 
munity consisting of father, mother, and child. 
This natural and instinctively originated com- 
munity is never perfect, and is never entirely 
stable. And hate can find a place in it as 
well as love. But we also know that this 
natural community possesses, even in the life 
of barbarous and uncultivated man, a normal 
stability, and a normal fruitfulness, as a basis 
of family peace and loyalty, which lies at the 

42 



COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETATION 

root of many very vast social organizations. 
Out of an aggregation and perfectly natural in- 
terconnection of such triadic family groups, or 
of what you may call triadic social molecules, 
a patriarchal social order can be built such 
as several very great and stable Oriental 
civilizations have richly illustrated. Time 
and fecundity favor the family. Its form 
tends to abide. It favors a type of love which 
forms a model for all the loyal. 

It behooves us then next to consider whether 
there are other groups of human beings, 
other communities, perhaps artificial, but 
essentially sound and progressive, which have 
characters such as the triadic union of father, 
mother, and child illustrates. And here- 
with our quest enters upon a new stage. 
Pairs are dangerous communities. Are there 
triadic communities which are less dangerous ? 
Are there many instances of such triads ? 
Can we name such ? 

As a fact, all of us depend for the opportu- 
nity to do our daily business upon the existence, 
upon the stability, and upon the fruitfulness 

43 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

of such relatively peaceful and loyal triadic 
social groups. Let us name a few of them; 
for in this field concrete examples are espe- 
cially instructive. Let us talk then no more 
of pairs of lovers or of rivals. Let us consider 
some communities which are essentially groups 
of three individuals, or of three groups of 
men. 

Suppose that somebody, — let us call him 
A, — desires to do business with another man, 
whom we will call C. So far, some relation 
involving the pair consisting of A and C is 
sought. But perhaps A and C are dwellers 
in different cities, or in different countries. 
Perhaps they are not on speaking terms. 
Perhaps they speak different languages. Per- 
haps each is too busy about his own affairs 
to dream of interrupting the other. In such 
cases the dual relation whereby A might do 
business with C, cannot readily be established. 
What shall A do ? 

A form of business which daily grows, in 
the modern world, more and more important, 
hereupon suggests itself to our minds. Sup- 

44 



COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETATION 

pose that A finds some third man, — let us 
call him B, — who undertakes to represent 
A's plans to C, to interpret, to explain, to urge 
them in C's presence; to act, in a word, as the 
agent of A in the proposed dealing with C. 
Let the business hereupon be carried out 
according to this method. That is, let A 
find the agent B. Let this agent, let B do 
the proposed work. 

Hereupon there will be formed a community 
consisting essentially of three persons, A, B, C, 
who occupy different places in this community. 
Their relations will be not merely dual or 
dyadic, but treble or triadic. And each will 
have, in the resulting triadic transaction, an 
unique place. Each can be named by this, 
his special function in this triadic community. 

This community will consist of what is 
usually called a principal, of an agent, and of 
a client, or other such man, to whom the agent 
represents the principal. The relations of these 
three persons are such as need to be expressed 
in triadic terms. This community cannot be 
reduced to a mere collection of pairs. If you 

45 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

try to understand its structure, you will find 
that you have to think in terms and in rela- 
tions with which the study of mere pairs of 
persons cannot make you familiar. 

And now, this community is such that its 
relations have a most instructive practical 
value. To observe what this value is, you 
have first to observe that this community 
is naturally a peace-loving community. Every 
business involving a stable type of agency 
depends upon mutual respect and confidence. 
And you then have also to remember that in 
our modern world we daily come to be more 
and more dependent upon finding and using 
agents. New forms of agency, new classes of 
agents, accompany every advance of civi- 
lization. And you have still further to re- 
member that agents tend on the whole to further 
international as well as personal peace and good 
will. 

The type of community here in question 
needs in view of its vast power, effectiveness, 
and fruitfulness, a name of its own. Let me 
suggest a name. I need a very general name, 

46 



COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETATION 

for this type of community in question is also 
exemplified by triads of men, or groups of 
men, whose relations you would hardly think 
of defining by means of the term agent. Com- 
mon to all the communities of this type is 
their tendency to further peace, good will, 
and loyalty, and to have an unifying influence 
both upon individuals and upon nations. 

I venture to call a community such as 
that consisting of principal, agent, and client 
exemplifies, a Community of Interpretation. 
It is a community having a very wonder- 
ful adaptation to the most various social 
tasks. It is the best type of community 
that we know, just because of its general 
tendency, illustrated in widely various special 
examples, towards stability, unity, and practi- 
cal effectiveness. Our most productive as 
well as our most ideal sorts of business daily 
require us either to become members of some 
sort of community of interpretation, or, when 
we are already members, to act loyally in 
accordance with the place that we occupy 
in such a community. Such communities 

47 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

are not merely convenient. They are indis- 
pensable to civilized life. They are not merely 
so frequent as to be commonplace, but they 
are socially so potent as to seem, in some of 
their exemplifications, almost superhuman 
in the skill and in the humane sort of social 
unity which they create and sustain. Having 
begun with the extremely well-known instance 
of the community consisting of a principal, 
an agent, and a man, sometimes called a 
client, to whom the agent represents the 
principal, we may at once characterize in very 
general terms the mere form which any com- 
munity of interpretation possesses. 

A community of interpretation consists 
of three persons, or groups of persons, who 
are its members. We may call these members 
A, B, and C. We may first think of them 
as individual men. We shall find, however, 
that in general, each of the members of a 
community of interpretation not only may 
also be a group of men ; but that this indi- 
vidual group in such a community may be 
much more numerous than is any now exist- 

48 



COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETATION 

trig nation. Our present interest lies in the 
form of the community of interpretation, in 
its relations to the warlike, to the peaceful, 
and to the loyal tendencies and dispositions 
of men. We wish to show that, on the whole, 
a community of interpretation, not only is, 
in itself, a peaceful group of men, but also 
may be, and frequently is, a very highly 
active and strenuous and creative community ; 
and that its life essentially tends to enrich 
both the power and the unity of mankind. 
A community of interpretation is a sort of 
artificially created but marvelously fruitful 
family. Of social molecules, each of which 
consists of three atoms, or individuals united 
in a community of interpretation, the most 
potent and peaceful and reasonable social 
orders in the modern world consist. 

We also wish to show that, if the world's 
peace is to be furthered, such progress must take 
the form of creating and sustaining certain 
definable communities of interpretation. We 
shall be able to show that this our main thesis, 
in this paper, is at once a philosophical prin- 
e 49 



WAR AXD INSURANCE 

ciple. and a perfectly practical and business- 
like proposal, whose truth and value the mar- 
ket place exemplifies as well as does any 
rightly constituted theory of society. By 
this thesis our philosophy of war will be at a 
stroke converted into a philosophy of peace, 
and that without our confining ourselves to 
any merely Utopian dreams or plans. We 
shall show, not indeed how universal peace 
is at once to be attained, but how the human 
world is now actually on the way towards 
a possible, even if very distant, universal 
peace ; and we shall also show that this way 
lies along the very lines of progress which the 
form and the functions of any community 
of interpretation exemplify. 1 

A, B, and C, the members of any community 
of interpretation, work together upon a task 

1 The idea, although not the name of the "Community of 
Interpretation/'" is derived by me from certain essays of the 
late logician. \£r. Charles Peirce. The philosophical bearing 
of this idea, and its relations to very deep and far-reaching 
philosophical issues, have been discussed in Vol. IT of my 
recent work entitled the '"Problem of Christianity'" (New 
York. 1913 . The present application of Peirce's theory of 
interpretation to the philosophy of war and peace is. so far as 
I know., new. 

50 



COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETATION 

which is at once theoretical and practical, — 
at once businesslike and ideal, — a task 
which may be as unemotional and imper- 
sonally stern in its requirements as is any 
serious business of men, but which may also 
require all the passionate devotion, and all 
the eager loyalty, which any man can give. 
This task, in its simplest expression, is this. 
A and C, to use again the phrase of Ham- 
let, have their own individual "business and 
desire, such as they are." The remaining 
member of the community, whom I now call 
B, has, as his peculiar business in this com- 
munity, the task of addressing C, and of 
explaining or interpreting to C what A's 
desire or business is, to the end that C may 
be brought into some definite sort of coopera- 
tion with A. 

This cooperation, if it occurs at all, will 
bring A and C into some kind of social unity, 
such as will make them act as if they were, 
in a certain respect, one man. To bring 
about this sort of solidarity, and this cooper- 
ation of C with A, is the interpreter's main 

51 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

aim and interest, so far as he is indeed 
the interpreter of this community. He 
desires, just as any reasonable agent desires, 
not to do A's will alone, nor C's will alone, 
but at once to create and to make conscious, 
and to carry out, their united will, in so far as 
they both are to become and remain members 
of that community in which he does the work of 
the interpreter. 

Since B has this united will of A and C 
as his aim and inspiration, he must be what 
I call loyal. That is, he must be the willing, 
and, for the purposes of this special task of 
interpretation, the thoroughgoing servant 
of the cause of uniting the will of C, to whom 
he represents the ideas of A, with the plans 
of A, whom he interprets. B, the interpreter, 
is therefore the most important member of 
the community in question. For he both 
defines and expresses its united purpose. 
He brings C into touch with A. He holds 
them together. His essential aim as inter- 
preter is that not his own private will, but 
the will of the whole community, should be 

52 






COMMUNITY OF INTERPRETATION 

done, and that A and C should act as one man, 
while, in bringing A and C together, he usually 
discovers or in some measure creates their 
common will. Hence B is above all the most 
obviously and explicitly loyal member of the 
community. On the other hand, — "in his 
will," when he finds and expresses it, "is the 
peace" both of A and of C. His success lies 
in this peace. His "business and desire," if 
he is indeed a successful interpreter, create, 
sustain, and constantly increase their 
harmony. "To this end he comes" into this 
community. He incarnates and furthers and 
enlightens its aims, precisely in so far as he 
worthily fulfills his business as interpreter. 

In the single case, as in the market place 
or in the office, the business or the idea which 
B interprets to C, and the common will of 
the community of interpretation which B 
discovers, expresses, or carries out, may relate 
to matters of a commonplace, or even of a 
sordid character ; but on the whole there is no 
ideal activity of man which is too lofty to be 
expressed or furthered through a community 

53 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

of interpretation. For all rational plans in- 
volve the cooperation of pairs of men, — the 
union and the unity and harmony of the 
wills of those who are to cooperate. But, for 
the very reasons heretofore pointed out, such 
union and such unity cannot be stable, secure, 
and enlightened, unless to the pair of men who 
are to cooperate there is added the third man 
whose business and desire it is to bring and 
to keep these two in touch each with the 
other. Such a mediator is precisely an inter- 
preter of one of the two men to the other. 
The interpreter has then the function to 
transform the essentially dangerous pair into 
the consciously and consistently harmonious 
triad. 

Because the interpreter B at once discovers 
or creates and expresses the one meaning and 
will of A and C, I have called him "The Spirit 
of the Community." 



54 



SPECIAL COMMUNITIES OF INTERPRETATION 

" ET me next return from the generaliza- 
tion which the mention of the ideal 
business of an agent has suggested to us, to 
further special examples of communities of 
interpretation. Let me call your atten- 
tion to three such communities. They are 
both practical and ideal in their nature. 
They are both businesslike and redeeming 
in their influence. 

The civilized world has long depended, 
for some of its most characteristic and precious 
life, upon one of these communities. 

The two other communities are modern. 
Until very recently the world knew only the 
most rudimentary beginnings of them. But 
they have already transformed, in certain 
profoundly significant respects, the modern 
world. They dominate our social order more 

55 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

and more ; and they will continue to do so, 
transforming it at a rate which promises for 
a long time to increase. 

The three communities of interpretation 
which are now in my mind are these : — 

1. The judicial community. 

2. The banker's community. 

3. The community of insurance. 

All of these three communities are coordinated 
with the agent's community, and cooperate 
with various forms of the latter, so that you 
may say : Our present civilization depends, 
for all its most peaceful, worldly, and practical 
activities, upon these four distinct sorts of 
communities of interpretation. If you re- 
moved all four from our social order, then 
this our human world, precisely upon its most 
practical and constructive side, would degen- 
erate into a vast aggregate of the dangerous 
communities which are pairs. The family 
triads aforesaid would indeed remain as the 
principal basis for the loyal life of mankind ; 
while a few other less visible and less obviously 
practical types of triads would characterize 

56 



COMMUNITIES OF INTERPRETATION 

so much of our civilization as still would be 
left to us. 

Let us look a little closer at the communities 
of interpretation now before us. The agent's 
community we have already characterized. 

The judicial community consists of a pair 
of contending individuals or social groups, 
while the third member of the group is a judge, 
or umpire, or arbiter, or mediator, whose 
office consists in interpreting to a defendant 
the will, the case, and the legal or social 
rights of a complainant or plaintiff. 

The judicial community is the most ancient 
and familiar of the communities of inter- 
pretation. Upon the dignity and authority 
of judges and umpires the social world de- 
pends for the control and transformation of 
certain well-known consequences of the original 
sin of the dyadic relations. From social 
conditions, which, if uncontrolled, directly 
lead to elemental warfare, the judicial com- 
munity actively leads the way to other social 
conditions which constitute peace. The peace 
thus won is not in general the peace which 

57 



WAR AXD INSURANCE 

the Dkammapada advises us to seek by sub- 
stituting love for hate. But it is the peace 
which incites men to new cooperations as 
soon as the contention is thus judicially settled. 
Hence the judicial community is indispensable 
to civilization. 

The banker's community consists of a bor- 
rower., of a lender., and of a third person whose 
life and interest it is. in general, to make the 
relation of the borrower and the lender a re- 
lation that is profitable to both of them. This 
third person is that active interpreter of 
credits, that expert as to the safety of loans. 
who is known as a banker. The lender de- 
posits with the banker. The banker ac- 
commodates the borrower. Or. if the borrower 
and the lender are that very dangerous pair 
consisting of persons known as a promoter 
and an investor, the banker may then appear 
as a broker., whose business it is to bring and 
to keep investors in profitable and fruitful 
touch with those who undertake or promote 
novel enterprises, for whic_: :hry :::-: :? :~:1. 

Apart from the banker or broker, acting as 
58 



COMMUNITIES OF INTERPRETATION 

interpreter, the pair consisting of a borrower 
and a lender is a peculiarly dangerous pair. 
The advice of the Dhammapada, the "old 
rule" that hatred ceases by love, becomes not 
merely ineffective but bitterly and tragically 
humorous, when applied to the natural re- 
lations which tend to arise within this pair 
consisting of borrower and lender. The an- 
cient and medieval social world knew of 
borrowing and lending mainly as calamitous 
social relations, which seemed fatally to lead 
to avarice, to fraud, and to the bondage of 
those debtors whom want or overconfidence 
had thrown into the hands of their creditors. 

One of the most dramatic of all social trans- 
formations has been that which has been due 
to the appearance, in the modern world, of 
the banker's community of interpretation. 
Out of an aggregation of the social molecules 
which are, in one way or another, banker's 
communities, the whole vast and productive 
system of modern credit has grown. The 
result is that, as a noted publicist some years 
ago said to me : "Ours is the age, and ours is 

59 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

the civilization of the broker." You easily 
see what this publicist meant. You all know 
how, despite all the unhappy social accidents 
that interrupt the workings of the modern 
system, and that mar both its morals and its 
success, the modern credit system is, on the 
whole, both a result of loyalty and a trainer 
of loyalty. 

For, necessary to the great banker's endur- 
ing success is his steadfast loyalty to his 
function as interpreter and so as the. "spirit 
of his community." Just as he may other- 
wise fail, so he may defraud. But, on the 
whole, banking has made not only for thrift, 
for cooperation, for the constant increase of 
investment, for confidence, and so for the 
unity of mankind, but it has also made for 
loyalty; and has in fact both taught loyalty 
to the business world and exemplified loyalty, 
as only the work of a community of inter- 
pretation can do. The banker's community, 
then, is the social molecule of a vast organism, 
whose life is, on the whole, a life of peaceful 
construction, and in that sense a life of a true 

60 



COMMUNITIES OF INTERPRETATION 

love of mankind. If war ever ceases, if peace 
ever comes, the banker's community will 
have had an important share in the process. 

It remains next to speak of the community 
of insurance. Everybody knows in general 
of its vast and transforming influence, and 
of its recently acquired social importance. 
Few notice the reason why it has become so 
important* Our previous study of the general 
characters of the community of interpreta- 
tion can be easily applied to the community 
of insurance. 

Men take risks. They are often obliged 
to do so. Sometimes they take them merely 
because they love risks. But when a man 
takes a risk and loses, there is in general some- 
body else who has to bear the consequences 
of this loss. It may be his creditor, his assign, 
his heir, or his next friend, upon whom the 
loss falls ; but, since nobody liveth unto him- 
self, and nobody dieth unto himself, the man 
who takes a risk is seldom the only man who 
pays for the loss. Now let us call the man who 
takes the risk A. Then let the man who has 

61 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

to bear the loss if A loses, but who of course 
might correspondingly win if A won. be named 
C. and let us call him A's possiV.t b-rr.tf.cic 
who of course may be. if A loses, quite the 
opposite of a receiver of benefits. 

Now the relation of A to C, the relation of 
the man who takes the risk, to the man who 
may win if A wins, but who will lose if A loses, 
is a dyadic relation. Like the other human 
social relations of pairs, it is dangerous. It 
daily embitters the relations of debtors and 
creditors. It daily makes some people penni- 
less, and inspires others with hate. Its very 
danger makes it morbidly fascinating to those 
who have once learned to gamble. It fills 
the social order with fears and suspicions. 
It wrecks souls. And you cannot escape 
from the poison of this dangerous relation by 
merely loving the man whose risks lead to 
losses which you have to bear. Love seldom 
cures any such fool of his folly, and the one 
who loves him suffers the more because of 
the love. 

Now the community of insurance comes to 
6-2 



COMMUNITIES OF INTERPRETATION 

exist when somebody, let us call him B, under- 
takes to bring the man who takes the risk 
into a true and active union of interest with 
his possible beneficiary. The members of 
the community of insurance are the ad- 
venturer A, that is the man who takes the risk, 
the beneficiary C, and the insurer, who is the 
spirit of the community, and who is commonly 
incarnate in some corporate community. 

The insurer B estimates or interprets the 
insurable value of the risk which A takes. 
For a consideration corresponding to this 
insurable value, B undertakes to make C not 
only A's possible beneficiary, but A's actual 
and reasonably secure beneficiary. That is, 
B insures the beneficiary C against any loss 
due to the risk which A takes. 

For reasons which can only be stated in 
terms of the theory of probability this result 
can be reached only in case many risks are 
estimated, and insured by the same insurer B. 
Hence the insurer's community tends, far 
more than even the banker's community, to 
demand some larger union of the social 

63 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

molecules whereof the single community of 
interpretation consists. In consequence in- 
surance very largely takes the form of mutual 
insurance. It brings men together in vaster 
and in more highly organized and articulated 
groups than the banker's world knows. It 
leads to constantly new social expressions. 
It contributes to peace, to loyalty, to social 
unity, to active charity, as no other community 
of interpretation has ever done. It tends, in 
the long run, to carry us beyond the era of 
the agent and of the broker into the coming 
social order of the insurer. We cannot predict 
all that it will yet accomplish; but we can 
already see that of all the business relations 
and of all the practical communities yet devised, 
the insurance relations and the insurance com- 
munities most tend to bring peace on earth, 
and to aid us towards the community of mankind. 



64 



VI 

MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

FN the search for influences that might 
further the cause of international peace, 
well-known efforts have already been made to 
devise practical and international uses of the 
judicial community, of the banker's com- 
munity, and of the agent's community. Each 
of these efforts has so far proved both con- 
ditionally useful and frequently disappoint- 
ing. No adequate effort has yet been made to 
further the cause of peace through the deliberate 
application of the form of the insurer's com- 
munity to international business. Now this is 
what I propose as my present contribution to 
these dark problems. 

The foregoing study of the triadic communi- 
ties of interpretation, and of the dangerous 
character of those communities which are 
pairs, has been needed to enable us to show 
f 65 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

why this newest of the great communities of 
interpretation has so rapidly acquired its 
vast influence over the social destinies of men 
and why we need to put it to new uses. 

Our whole discussion up to this point has 
prepared the way, therefore, for our final 
thesis, which is this : — 

There is a still untried method of gradually 
leading towards international peace, and of 
rendering wars progressively less destructive 
and less willful. This is the method to which 
I call your attention. It is in general the method 
of undertaking mutual international insurance 
against some of the common calamities to which 
all mankind, or certain large portions of man- 
kind, are subject. Stated in terms of our 
theory of the communities of interpretation, 
this method may assume the form of a maxim, 
or if you like, of a proposed constitution or 
international agreement upon which a new 
community of insurance may be founded, as 
follows : — 

Apply to international relations, gradually 
and progressively, that principle of insurance 

66 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

which has been found so unexpectedly fruitful 
and peaceful and powerful and unifying in the 
life and in the social relations of individual men. 

Begin to make visible the community of 
mankind, not merely, as at present, in the 
form of alliances which are ambiguous, and 
at times irritating, and of arbitration treaties 
which are likely to be broken at some passion- 
ate moment when they are most needed, but 
in the form of a sufficiently large board of 
financially expert trustees, whose membership 
is international, whose services are duly com- 
pensated from the funds of the trust, and whose 
conduct is guided by plainly stated rules 
which have the substantially unanimous con- 
sent of all the nations concerned in the plan 
of mutual insurance which is in question. 
Let these rules be changeable only by the sub- 
stantially unanimous consent of the members 
of the already existing community of insur- 
ance, or in such wise as not to abridge rights 
which the already existent body of rules have 
created. 

Let the funds of the mutual insurance organi- 
67 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

zation in question be put, in form, into the 
charge of some well-known and, so to speak, 
essentially neutral power, such as Sweden, or 
Switzerland. Let this fund be protected from 
merely predatory assaults by the fact that 
under the rules, it would, from the first, be 
invested by the board of international trustees, 
that is by the incorporated insurance com- 
munity, in decidedly various investments, and 
in various parts of the world, so that it could 
not be found or used by any one power unless 
this power had first violently conquered all of 
the nations that had contributed to the trust, 
and that had, under the rules thereby acquired, 
a definite interest in its distribution. 

Let rules be formulated, as such became 
needful, to regulate the conditions under 
which one of the partners in the plan of mutual 
insurance could surrender, with or without 
notice, its already acquired rights under the 
insurance agreement. 

Let the international insurance community 
in question have no direct political powers or 
duties whatever. Let it be purely a financial 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

and fiduciary body, with a minimum of in- 
evitable judicial functions. 

Let its fidelity to its trust and to its rules 
be guaranteed simply by the size of its con- 
trolling board, by the personal character, the 
experience, and the mode of selection of the 
members of this board, and by the entire 
publicity of all its proceedings and official 
acts. 

Let it have no powers as an arbitrator in 
case of international disputes, but entire 
autonomy, under general rules, regarding those 
judicial decisions which it would inevitably 
have, from time to time, to render, when disputes 
arose as to what rights the individual members 
of this international union for mutual insurance 
had acquired or forfeited by their own acts as 
sovereign powers. 

Let it lay down no arbitrary rules for inter- 
national morality; let it not undertake to 
codify international law; let it hold aloof 
from all politically colored international dis- 
putes. 

On the other hand, let there be simply no 
69 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

appeal from its deliberate and judicial deci- 
sions as to the financial and fiduciary matters 
which were left to its decision and discretion 
by the international agreement for mutual 
insurance. 

Let any and all the sovereign states of the 
world, great or small, at war or not at war, 
whether accused or not of present or past 
barbarism by their neighbors, be at any time 
at liberty under general and financially pre- 
cise rules, to enter the international insurance 
community as new members, to contribute 
to its fund, and to receive in turn an amount 
of insurance against a definite sort of national 
calamities — an amount which, as in case of 
ordinary mutual insurance companies, should 
be duly proportioned to the deposit made. 1 

Finally, so far as this first outline sketch 



1 Let it freely cooperate, when it chose and in so far as its 
functions permitted, with the plans, the influences, and the 
undertakings of the Hague tribunal. But, since its own 
business is thus financial and fiduciary, let it not itself be 
subject to the Hague tribunal and let it carefully avoid, 
so far as possible, the actual taking part in arbitration or 
"judicial settlement of international disputes." 

70 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

of our plan is concerned, let a provision be 
made for emergencies as follows : A nation, 
insured under the agreement, might undergo 
revolutions, or might be conquered in war, 
or might be divided into several states, or 
might be lost in some new federation of vari- 
ous states. This transformed sovereign state 
might already have acquired, before its dis- 
appearance, larger or smaller rights to an 
insurance payment, under conditions which 
might have come to be actually realized. In 
this case, the trustees of the mutual international 
insurance organization would have sole power 
to decide what state or states, if any, had inherited 
the insurance payment or payments due to the 
state which had thus passed away from the now 
visibly represented family of nations. If, how- 
ever, the trustees of the fund decided, formally 
and judicially, and of course after due investi- 
gation, and quite publicly: "No now exist- 
ing state has justly inherited the insurance 
rights which belonged to the formerly existing 
state. The dead state is now unrecognizable 
among the living states" — then the insurance 

71 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

rights of the dead state would simply lapse; 
and its insured funds would return to the 
general fund, to be used by the remaining 
members of the community of mutual insur- 
ance under the general rules. Thus a motive 
would be furnished whereby both internal revolu- 
tions and external conquests would be made less 
attractive to disturbers of the social or of the 
international peace of mankind. 

Furthermore, if, at the end of a war, the 
vanquished power had some right under the 
mutual insurance agreement to certain funds, 
and if the victor hereupon insisted upon forc- 
ing the vanquished to surrender, as a spoil 
of war, its rights under the contract of mutual 
insurance or the funds due to it under these 
rights, then a treaty thus to surrender the prop- 
erty rights or the money due to the vanquished 
under the insurance agreement, would auto- 
matically make void the whole insurance contract 
which the vanquished had made. From the 
moment the vanquished had been forced to 
surrender its funds, now due, or its rights 
acquired under the insurance contract, from 

72 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

that moment the insurance trustees would 
simply pay nothing of the funds in question 
either to the vanquished power or to any other 
single power. The whole fund in question would 
simply return to the common fund, and be used 
for the common benefit of all the nations that 
participated. 

So much for a first sketch of the proposed 
agreement of mutual insurance. You will 
ask : Against what evils should this mutual 
international insurance company, when once 
organized, attempt to insure its clients? 

In answer, first, think of the long possible 
list of evils from which directly or indirectly 
all the nations suffer, and with which, in the 
first place, war itself has perhaps little, — 
perhaps nothing to do. Such evils are widely 
distributed, have an incidence which affects 
now this people and then that people, are 
capable of a careful statistical study, and are 
therefore in principle insurable. Individual 
nations cannot in general insure their subjects 
against them. A community of nations could 
insure an individual nation against them, and 

73 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

could pay over a guaranteed sum to the insured 
and suffering nation. 

A brief and inadequate list of such calami- 
ties is as follows : — 

1. Destructive earthquakes and volcanic 
eruptions. 

2. Certain of the migratory pestilences, and 
in particular, certain of the tropical diseases. 

3. Some of the destructive storms of the 
type which follow, in general, known tracks 
but strike special localities by chance (such 
for instance as the West India hurricanes, 
and the China Sea typhoons). 

4. Recurrent famines and great crop 
failures. 

5. Marine disasters. (For the ocean exacts 
a statistically definable toll from the commerce 
of the whole world.) 

Herewith varying a little the type of cases, 
we may further mention : — 

6. The destruction in war time of the private 
property belonging to the subjects of unques* 
tionably neutral states. (This is a first men- 
tion of the "war risks" which our insurance 

74 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

company might learn, in its gradual growth, 
more and more to insure.) 

Now suppose a community of mutual 
international insurance once instituted upon 
such general lines. To the foregoing list 
of internationally insurable losses, a great 
number of others can and would soon be added. 
What would be the general result ? 

The mutual insurance community would be 
sure to do what other mutual companies have 
done. 

1. It would proceed carefully to investigate 
such losses both from a statistical point of view 
and with regard to their causes. 

2. It would attempt to reduce the number and 
magnitude of these causes. To this end it 
would use all possible moral influences con- 
sistent with its functions as a trustee. Being 
no political state, and having no protection 
except the fact that its funds were nearly 
inaccessible to any predatory power, it could 
use none indeed but moral influences. But 
on the other hand, being no Hague tribunal, 
although often cooperating with that tribunal, 

75 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

it would not be likely to irritate its clients 
by unwelcome judicial decisions about already 
bitterly controversial matters. It would need 
to ask for no new arbitration treaties. It 
would leave to the Hague tribunal the work 
of formulating international law. Its own 
function would be the higher one of cultivating 
international cooperation through mutual in- 
surance against common evils and thereby 
teaching by example the meaning and the 
attractiveness of the loyalty of each indi- 
vidual nation to the community of all nations. 
Mutual insurance would make this community 
visible. 

3. But these, its non-controversial and 
purely moral influences, would still be influ- 
ences whose source would be the first spirit of the 
community of all mankind which would ever 
yet have won permanent and visible presence 
on earth. In its efforts not only to alleviate 
but to prevent pestilence and famine, the 
board of trustees, representing all the nations 
in the community of insurance, would inspire 
all the nations actually to work together, at once 

76 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

in a charitable and in a businesslike way, as 
they have never worked before. As the spirit 
of this triadic community, the insurance organi- 
zation would both exemplify and teach loyalty. 
Now the nations, living, thus far, in dangerous 
pairs, and in groups of pairs, have never yet 
had any chance of acquiring international 
loyalty. 

We have then a vast experience of business- 
like activities behind us when we assert that 
this triadic community, once founded, would 
ceaselessly tend to increase, to discover new 
powers, and to exercise new and peaceful 
influences. 

But you will ask : Could it go farther ? 
Could it insure its members against any of the 
evils of actual war? And if it did so, would 
that still more directly tend towards the 
diminishing of wars ? 

I answer that, if large enough, this com- 
munity of mutual international insurance could 
insure its members progressively against more 
and more of the evils and destructive calamities 
due to war, by the simple addition of one very 

77 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

important rule to the rules so far laid down : 
If a nation had a war with another, the insur- 
ance trustees would never directly inquire 
as to the moral justification of this war, but 
would ask : Who committed the first act of war? 
No nation would receive insurance compensation 
for any expenses due to a war in which it com- 
mitted the first act of war. This rule would, 
in each case, require judicial interpretation. 
But this again would be no arbitration of a 
Hague tribunal, but purely a financier's 
decision as to whether or no an insurance 
policy was at least temporarily or in a single 
case vitiated by an act of a nature known 
beforehand.' 

For the rest, in so far as our insurance com- 
pany undertook to pay any war expenses, it 
would get a businesslike interest in averting 
the causes of war which would express the 
will of all the insuring nations, and which 
would possess a fecundity, an ingenuity, and 
a wisdom of which we shall know nothing 
until we get such a community of interpre- 
tation formed to teach the nations, by the potent 

78 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

devices of mutual insurance, the art of loyalty 
, to the community of mankind. 

But you will say, such a community would 
need to begin with very vast financial re- 
sources. How shall the nations, now absorbed 
in greed and in rivalries, the dangerous pairs, 
be induced to invest their funds in so prodi- 
gious and humane an undertaking? 

To this question the present moment fur- 
nishes the fitting answer. Herein lies the very 
core of the present practical proposal. For, 
when the present war is ended, one side 
will be the victor. That side will include 
more than one nation. The victors will jointly 
or severally demand an indemnity or several 
indemnities from the vanquished, and might 
raise some new quarrel over the division of 
the spoils. Well, — let the victors make their 
demand together. Let them demand one indem- 
nity from all the vanquished. When it is paid, 
let the victors at once begin and actively establish 
the first mutual international insurance com- 
pany against national calamities, including 
wars. Let them devote this whole indemnity 

79 



WAR AND INSURANCE 

to forming the initial fund of this company. 
Let them deposit the fund with the trustees, 
and under the formal care of Switzerland or of 
Sweden. Then let them draw up their rules, 

and thenceforth invite all sovereign states, great 
or small, including the vanquished states, to 
insure by payments and enjoy all the advan- 
tages of the insurance. This act of thus using 
the war indemnity will be 'much less wasteful 
than to waste it in preparations for future war. 
The vanquished will not hope to make it an 
object of future plunder. It ivill henceforth 
be the fund of the community of all mankind. 
And this community of all mankind ivill begin 
to take on visible form, presence, and power to 
save. 

Lincoln on a famous occasion used a triadic 
phrase. He spoke of "government of the 
people., by the people, and for the people." 

My thesis is that whenever insurance of the 
nations, by the nations, and for the nations begins, 
it will thenceforth never vanish from the earth, 
but will begin to make visible to us the holy city 
of the community of all -mankind. To such a 

80 



MUTUAL INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE 

vision perhaps we have a right, even while 
the slain lie awaiting burial. Let us dwell 
upon this vision, at once ideal and practical. 
Let us say of this vision, of this holy city, — 
"Even so, come quickly. For then, none of 
these dead will have died wholly in vain." 



81 



NOTES 

I. (See page 2) 

Steinmetz's "Philosophy of War" 
Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz is professor of Ethnology 
at the University of Amsterdam. His "Philosophic 
des Krieges" was first published in 1907 and has much 
influenced the train of thought which was first set 
forth in the present writer's "Philosophy of Loyalty 
(New York, 1908) ," and which has gradually led, through 
a series of intermediate books, to the present Address. 
That this influence has partly been due to my own op- 
position to certain of the theses of Steinmetz is obvious. 
But I hope that Section II of this Address clearly shows 
that in certain respects I stand greatly indebted to Stein- 
metz for some of his views regarding the war-like aspects 
of human nature. 

II. (See page 28) 

Kant's Doctrine concerning "Antagonism" as a 
Source of Social Development 

The Kantian views cited in the text of this Address, 
are outlined in his essay of 1784 entitled: "An Idea 
of an Universal History from a Cosmo-political Point 
of View." The " Fourth Principle " which Kant defines 

83 



NOTES 

regarding "the means which nature uses to bring hu- 
man powers to full development," declares that this 
means is furnished especially by the "Antagonism of 
men in society." Kant continues, "I mean by Antag- 
onism the anti-social sociability of mankind, that is, the 
tendency of man to enter social relations, accompanied 
as this tendency is with a constant resistance which 
perpetually threatens the very society thus formed." 
A little further on Kant continues : "It is this inner 
conflict which stirs all a man's powers and forces him 
to overcome his own natural sloth so that, driven by 
the love of fame, or of power over other men, or of 
greed, he seeks to win a rank among his fellow men, 
whom he can neither endure nor do without." " Thus 
begin the first true steps from crudity to cultivation. 
For cultivation consists in the social worth of man." 

Somewhat parallel considerations are urged by 
Steinmetz in his study of the way in which the warlike 
spirit of early man was the source of all his early virtues, 
including his kindliness, and his disposition to help his 
comrades in war and his dependents at home. A little 
later in the passage just cited from Kant's essay, Kant 
says, that without the distinctly unaniiable qualities 
involved in this inner conflict of human nature, primi- 
tive man might have lived in some arcadian form as 
shepherds live, or as sheep. But, as Kant adds, on 
the basis of such an amiable nature men would hardly 
have reached a life of higher value than the life of their 
cattle possesses. "Let us thank nature," says Kant, 

84 



NOTES 

"that man was quarrelsome and vain, greedy and a 
lover of power ! Without these qualities all man's 
noblest natural powers would have remained forever 
slumbering. Man desires harmony ; but nature knows 
better what is good for a race such as the human race 
is. Nature demands conflict. Man longs to live in 
comfort and pleasure, but nature gives him labor and 
painful strife, even in order that he may find the means 
of raising himself beyond these sorrows." Kant closes 
the passage with a sketch of the way in which these 
unamiable tendencies of men, leading to conflict, and 
even thereby beyond conflict, fit man for a rational 
life of peace. 

III. (See page 37) 

Love for Communities 
The definition of Loyalty as a willing and practical 
devotion of a self to a community has formed the 
theme of several of my own recent philosophical dis- 
cussions. Without accepting Kant's account of strife 
as the main source of human reasonableness, I have 
endeavored to make use of his view that the inner 
conflicts of the individual man as well as the dual con- 
flicts of man and man, arouse problems for which the 
solution is found only when a loyalty takes the place 
of this natural turbulence. The present Address differs 
from any of my former efforts to define the nature of 
loyalty through its very explicit use of the ideas of 
Charles Peirce, with special application to some com- 

85 



NOTES 

munities of the social and business world, and to the 
sort of devotion — at once prosaically businesslike, and 
capable of the most exalted piety — which communi- 
ties of this type especially exemplify. The more highly 
theoretical problems connected with the communities 
of interpretation find their place in the second volume 
of my recent book, "The Problem of Christianity." 



IV. 

Efforts already made to use the Four 

Communities of Interpretation in 

International Affairs 

The oldest of the communities of interpretation, the 
judicial community, has very naturally been the one 
to which recent advocates of "the substitution of 
judicial methods for warlike methods in the settle- 
ment of international disputes" have most appealed. 
Here the highest hopes of the so-called "Pacificists" 
have centered. The Hague tribunal undertakes to 
play its part in such a judicial community. It is no 
part of the purpose of this Address to ignore, or in any 
way to slight the importance of such judicial com- 
munities in international undertakings. Arbitration 
has played already a great part in the movement 
towards peace. It will in future come to play a still 
greater part. But I believe that it needs auxiliaries. 
It is one main purpose of this Address to insist upon 
the fact that the modern social and business world 

86 



NOTES 

already possesses such auxiliaries in the form of the 
other types of communities of interpretation. 

The limitations of the judicial communities as a 
means of ending war have been skillfully pointed out 
by Steinmetz. Stated in my own terms, these limita- 
tions are as follows : (1) International disputes often con- 
cern matters, which, at the moment, appear to those 
concerned too passionate in their interest to admit of 
arbitration. Even if previous arbitration treaties have 
been made, the "dangerous pair" which happens to 
be involved in a given controversy may be too much 
disturbed in its relations to take for the moment any 
interest in its former treaties. (2) At such moments 
the lover of peace may be disposed to appeal to national 
honor. But without entering upon any of the endless 
controversies as to what individual modern nations 
have behaved most honorably, or, on the other hand, 
have broken most treaties, it is enough to say that, in 
the relations of contending individual men, who happen 
to be members of the same social order, the judicial 
community appeals to the consciences of disputants, 
especially because they are already clearly aware of 
some sort of loyalty, which they owe to their own social 
order, as it is represented to them by their clan, by 
their nation, by their gods, or by their patriotism. If 
the contending individuals are nations, they at present 
do not form a community to which the most of them 
are consciously and practically loyal. But where no 
conscious loyalty exists to a community to which an 

87 



NOTES 

individual nation belongs, it is simply idle to talk of 
"national honor," because nobody can define "national 
honor" except in terms which presuppose the recogni- 
tion of a definite loyalty on the part of an individual 
nation to a community of nations. The present inter- 
national problem is to form such a community. The 
judge, where individual men are concerned, is espe- 
cially able to bring the contending parties loyally 
together, because he has other forms of loyalty to the 
social order to which he may appeal and which he may 
use as aids. Otherwise the litigants may simply decline 
to acknowledge his authority. If hereupon he appeals 
to promises which they have formerly made, they may 
very naturally say that, unless the judge and the dis- 
putants already possess a common country, a common 
social order, a common devotion to recognized reli- 
gions or customs, they, the contending litigants, see 
nothing binding in their former promises. In fact, 
as soon as the judge has to contend with one of the 
litigants with regard to the litigant's obligation to sub- 
mit the cause of contention to the judge, the rebellious 
litigant and the judge become a dangerous pair. In 
brief, the judicial community is very important in 
securing peace at the moment when its general authority 
is already recognized. It is less capable than are the 
other communities of interpretation of advancing its 
powers, and increasing the love which contentious and 
passionate individuals, or nations, may entertain for its 
value and for its dignity. 

88 



NOTES 

But if the judicial community finds that at some 
moment the passions of the contending parties lead 
them to disregard its authority, and to fail to realize 
that their former agreements honorably bind them to 
submit to its decision ; then the international tribunal, 
like the judge who sees before him a litigant in con- 
tempt of court, must if possible appeal to force. 
Whence, however, can the international court derive 
its force ? From an international army ? But the 
great moral forces upon which armies depend for their 
existence are forces of the sort now represented by 
patriotism. Will it be easy for the international army 
to arouse the enthusiasm which patriots now give to 
such demands as their country makes upon them for 
service ? In other words, when the great stresses come, 
the international tribunal has to depend upon motives 
which seem, at best, drearily reasonable just at the mo- 
ment when they most need to seem ideally inspiring. 
We may look to the future for an alteration of this 
situation, and for a gradual evolution of a genuine de- 
votion to institutions such as those which the Hague 
tribunal represents. But the community of mankind 
has first to be formed, to become visible, and so to be- 
come a factor in the daily business of the nations. 

Steinmetz further insists that since the nations, if 
prosperous, are constantly growing, in wealth, in popu- 
lation, and in undertakings, new problems will con- 
stantly ^'^■tjnternational law cannot be settled 
once for ^ ^iust adjust itself to constantly chang- 

89 



NOTES 

ing matters of controversy. An international court 
cannot undertake to do all the work of a legislator. 
But if there are no legislative bodies, new controversies 
will constantly arise in which the two litigants, if they 
consent to arbitrate at all, will come before the inter- 
national court with some such case as this : "We both 
of us want that to which, under existing international 
laws, neither of us has any clearly definable right." 
The comparatively recent controversy between Japan 
and Russia concerning the future of Korea, suggests a 
type of controversy which is not easily to be ruled out 
of the world, if various nations continue to prosper at 
all. Under such circumstances the international court 
may follow either one of two courses. It may decide 
arbitrarily in favor of one of the litigants as against 
the other. It may rule that they are both of them 
wrong and that they are required to compromise the 
question. But then it may be precisely the wise com- 
promise upon which nobody can agree with his neigh- 
bor. At this point we do not say that arbitration must 
necessarily fail. We can say, however, that we should 
like to find and use some other sort of community of 
interpretation as an auxiliary to the work of the tri- 
bunal. 

The banker's community has been proposed as an 
aid by a number of recent students of the problem of 
peace. In the long run, as many argue, war will 
cease, because a limit will come to tho^Ulingness of 
the banker to advance the necessary^^^^^^. Thus 

90 



NOTES 

bankers will be the peacemakers of the future. The 
questions here involved are enormously complex. If 
a limit exists, and a permanent limit, not merely a tem- 
porary hindrance, to the power of bankers to advance 
money for warlike purposes, such a limit does not very 
clearly appear visible to the unaided eye. Not merely 
the interest but the duty of the banker tends to make 
him willing, in the long run, to advance money to a 
nation for purposes which he himself views as legitimate, 
in case, acting as the interpreter of his banking com- 
munity, he believes that the loan can be disposed of 
in the open market. Therefore, so long as the patriot- 
ism and the prosperity of a nation enable it and perhaps 
inspire it to pay the interest on new bonds, the banker 
will not permanently interfere with the power of this 
nation to express its will through warfare. The 
bankers' community is itself a useful auxiliary to peace, 
but it certainly needs such a supplement as shall render 
the community of mankind not only visible, but a 
community doing a daily and interesting, a reasonably 
united form of business, and of business which involves 
at any moment a far-reaching cooperation among the 
nations. 

Hereupon, one may very naturally think of the 
numerous different forms of the agent's community. 
As a fact, the agent's community is a powerful factor 
in the promotion of the motives that lead towards 
peace. It will constantly become more powerful. 
Commerce aids mutual understanding in ways which 

91 



NOTES 

began to be potent at the very outset of civilization, 
and which increase some of the most beneficent of 
their powers, as we use agents more and more. But 
the agent's community does not of itself lead to that 
consolidation of various agent's communities into one 
system — that consolidation which is characteristic 
of the banker's community. A large increase in the 
number and complexity of agent's communities is com- 
patible with a large increase in the rivalries of these 
communities. There are various dangerous pairs of 
such communities which one finds in the commercial 
world; and these have emphasized a large number of 
international jealousies. 

Before the minds of all lovers of humanity there has 
long stood a vision of a Federal State formed on the 
basis of the existing states. Kant discussed this 
Federal Union of the future in his well-known essay on 
"Universal Peace." But the history of federal gov- 
ernment, and the modern rise of the intensely vigorous 
national consciousness which characterizes the world 
of to-day, and the connection of this modern national 
patriotism with the rise of an intelligent democracy, 
and with those very forms of human solidarity which 
otherwise seem most encouraging, — all these considera- 
tions taken together make the Federal State of man- 
kind seem farther away to-day than it could have seemed 
to Kant. It is not likely that the world peace will come 
in the form of a political federation of all the principal 
nations of mankind. 



NOTES 

The lesson is that we need to consider whether the 
community of mankind cannot become visible in the 
form of some other union than an international tri- 
bunal can adequately represent, than the growth and 
importance of banking can fully exemplify, than the 
evolution and significance of the modern communities 
of agency can insure, or than any political union 
of various nationalities can sufficiently exemplify. 

This is why the community of insurance, and the 
international board of trustees, with its wholly non- 
political type of union, and with its freedom from the 
obligations of an international court of arbitration, seem 
worthy of consideration. 

V. (See page 78) 
"The First Act of War" 

I lay no stress upon any detail regarding the formula- 
tion of the rule which I thus tentatively state. I my- 
self do not know how to define with any generality 
wherein a first act of war should consist. For the pur- 
poses of the present Address I lay no stress whatever 
upon any question regarding the moral guilt of any 
nation that is supposed to begin a war. It would be 
no part of the interests which the international board 
of insurance would represent, to read to the nations 
any moral lesson regarding the rights and wrongs of 
their past and future wars. The whole case upon 
which the present Address insists is this : — 

93 



NOTES 

The nations will gradually acquire a definite loyalty 
to the community of nations, and a definite conscience 
regarding their obligations to one another whenever 
they begin doing such business with one another, as 
insurance at present best exemplifies and tends to foster. 
Whenever such forms of business come to exist, the 
reasons why a wise nation will be indisposed to make 
warlike trouble for itself and for other nations will 
become, with time, clearer and clearer. On the other 
hand, as soon as the nations are in a position to begin 
any form of the business which insurance represents, 
there will be more and more objects coming into sight 
to which such forms of business can be extended. The 
process thus initiated will be cumulative. If such a 
process once were initiated, it would not be subject 
to the explosive accidents, which have suddenly, and 
with a discouraging violence, interrupted the advances 
heretofore made towards substituting judicial settle- 
ment of disputes for war. For this cumulative pro- 
cess would not wholly be founded upon the authority 
of judges, nor upon the fragile interests which might 
for a time make some form of international federation 
attractive, but which would be only too likely to be 
interrupted, whenever dangerous pairs of peoples or 
of races became too conscious of their hostilities, and 
hence reasoned that these hostilities must be "holy." 
The cumulative tendency towards organization which a 
board of trustees would exemplify, — when once it 
had been made trustworthy (which is humanly pos- 



NOTES 

sible), safe, and independent of political responsibilities, 
— this cumulative tendency would not be subject to 
such explosions and catastrophes as have beset all the 
forms of international organization thus far devised. 

In order to form a plan for making this type of organ- 
ization efficacious in discouraging the beginning of 
war, I have proposed, merely as one of numerous pos- 
sible provisions, the plan of writing the international 
policies subject to some such rule as the one mentioned 
regarding the "first act of war." Any other formula- 
tion which made a desirable policy such that it would 
be vitiated in case the nation holding the insurance 
rights in question voluntarily did anything which 
experience showed to be productive of an actual war — 
any other formulation of an analogous rule — would 
serve the purpose here in question. This purpose would 
be not directly to vindicate the moral law, or any partic- 
ular principle of international law, but to issue a 
policy of a form that tended to discourage the begin- 
ning of a war. For the best teaching of international 
morality must take, at present, indirect forms. 

The principles of the insurance trustees would be 
wholly business principles. They would teach loyalty 
by keeping loyally their trusts themselves, both to 
the nations that were their clients and to mankind; 
and by putting the nations, so far as they could, in 
such business relations with one another that the na- 
tions concerned would find it advantageous to behave 
in a businesslike fashion. The nations have grown 

95 



NOTES 

self-conscious enough to form at present pairs that 
are more dangerous than ever before in the world's 
history. I propose, by certain devices, to get them 
to do plain and profitable business with one another 
by means of some community of interpretation. I 
emphasize the community of insurance simply upon 
empirical grounds. That community has now proved 
itself the most fruitful of all communities of interpre- 
tation, in substituting businesslike motives which turn 
out to be both reasonable and ideal, for motives which, 
until insurance was invented, were hopelessly subject 
to capricious interferences and to dangerous conflicts. 

If any other community of interpretation can be 
named which will serve this purpose better than a 
community of insurance, and an international board 
of trustees, the purpose of this Address and of these 
Notes will have been wholly accomplished, so soon as 
any one can successfully define such a community and 
induce a group of nations to give it suitable work. 



96 



T 



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FROM THE PREFACE 

The passing of the Marine Insurance Act of 1906 (6 Edw. VII. Ch. 41) 
was the commencement of a new era in the law and practice of Marine In- 
surance in Britain. ... It has therefore appeared to the writer that in the 
present state of opinion the most useful kind of guide to the law and prac- 
tice of Marine Insurance would be a detailed statement of the provisions 
of the Marine Insurance Act with a supplement consisting of the essential 
parts of the leading judgments upon which the Act has confessedly been 
constructed. It is thought that such a supplement may be of value, not only 
historically, but as affording an explanation of points in the Act which may 
in the course of years become less clear than they were to the framers of the 
Bill and to the various authorities and bodies to whom it was submitted 
before it assumed its final form. 



CONTENTS 

Marine Insurance Act, 1906. 

Marine Insurance (Gambling Policies) Act, 1909. 

Historical Sketch. 

Commentary on the Marine Insurance Act, 1906. 

Note on the Marine Insurance (Gambling Policies) Act, 1909. 

Alphabetical List of Leading Cases. 

Chronological List of Leading Cases. 

Subject List of Leading Cases. 

Index of Cases Cited in the Commentary. 

Index of Extracts from Judgments in Leading Cases on Ma- 
rine Insurance. 

Extracts from Judgments in Leading Cases. 

Supplementary Extracts from Judgments in Leading Cases 
on General Average. 

General Index. 



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